Despite a major improvement in pressure and forward transition, Senior Coach Brad Scott said it was poor execution and costly turnovers which killed Essendon’s chances of getting over North Melbourne on Saturday night.

Although the Dons showed inroads in winning the inside 50 count and registering more scoring shots, a lack of polish prevented them from establishing an early lead and rendered their late comeback moot.

Scott acknowledged the natural mounting of pressure on any Club starting a campaign at 0-3 but remains confident that the strategy in place at the Bombers will pay dividends as time rolls on. 

Read the full rundown of his post-match presser from the 12-point defeat below. 

Scott on… effort and execution

Low base (for improvement, based on the last fortnight).

We were definitely better in the areas that we worked on in a short break. 

Based on what we worked on during the week of, I had a good feeling that the game would look different to the way it has in the previous two weeks.  

While very disappointed, we did some things well to give us good opportunity. 30-odd inside 50s in the first half gave us opportunity after opportunity, we defended pretty well. Still, that's a work in progress, but the difference tonight was our inability to execute with ball in hand. 

We just coughed the ball up and missed opportunities on a regular basis. 

Even though we defended rebound really well at least in the first half, we turned the ball over so badly in such bad spots. Some of the places we're turning over the ball at the moment, it's very hard to set up behind that. 

I think at one stage we were bouncing out of defensive 50 to inside 50 at 64 per cent in the first half. Now if you have a number like that in transition, you ask ‘how many times did we score?’ 

But we didn't, so we just let ourselves down in our execution going forward. 

I thought we took good steps forward in that tonight in terms of how we pressure, how we defended overall. But if you keep giving the ball back, you're going to be defending a lot.  

Scott on… his experienced players

(The leaders are) doing their best. There's no doubt that they're hurting, they're frustrated. 

I think that they are made of the right stuff. We're in a difficult juncture - you probably want to talk about Merrett being well held tonight, and the frustration that I have is that we can’t support him as well as we'd like to at the moment. 

Scott on… the debutant 

A big part of the reason to bring Jacob Farrow into the team tonight is because while he probably didn’t have a massive influence on the contest, he looked like an AFL player. 

Beautiful composure, beautiful kick. That's how we need to start bringing guys like that into our team.

Scott on… sticking to strategy 

Essendon’s been through some really difficult times. We’re going through a difficult time at the moment but we’ll be fine. We’ve got a strategy, it's really clear, we know what we're doing.

The medium-to-long term is something that we're really excited about, and the decisions we made, we accepted that there was short-term vulnerability and there might be some short-term pain but we're willing to endure that. 

A press conference is not a good forum to explain (what that medium-to-long term translates to).

Just look at the way that we’ve built our list over the last three years, the decisions we made to prioritise youth over experience. It’d make my life a lot easier just to bring experienced players in, but I'm not in it for the easy. I'm in it to build a platform for this club that has been starved of success for a long time. 

We want to turn it around quickly but the decisions we’re making are to build that platform, not to look for the quick fix, which is very tempting when you feel some pressure.

I don’t mean just me (feeling pressure) because the whole club feels it, you react. That's why you have a strategy. Ours is really clear.