After back-to-back second half fadeouts off promising starts, Essendon VFL finally pieced it all together for a resounding 51-point blowout win over GWS on the road last weekend.

Still very much in the hunt (only percentage outside of the top 10) at this stage with their competitive start to the season, the VFL Bombers are focusing on a week-to-week build.

For Cameron Joyce, who’s now fielded a whopping 45 total players due to frequent changes at both the AFL and VFL selection tables, the emphasis remains on preparing players as best as possible to make the jump to senior level.

Joyce on… a breakthrough result

It's funny, I thought we might be building towards this kind of performance coming, but at the same time we had to go and execute it.

Our last five, probably six games, we've played some really good footy in some of those games but we just haven't been able to quite get it done at the end.

It was just nice for the boys to get a bit of belief and a bit of reward for effort after half time on the weekend.

Joyce on… selection, players staying adaptable

It's probably a part of being a VFL coach is being able to adapt, to be flexible.

Guys are coming in and out of the team from an AFL point of view, but also some of the VFL guys are changing as well.

You know, we've played 45 players over the first seven rounds. We’ve had to move and adapt and shape things differently. We’ve all taken it in our stride and I think it's been great getting lots of guys opportunities.

Hopefully through this, we find some players from a VFL perspective, but we also develop guys to go back up into the AFL and perform really strongly.

There were a couple of guys from the week before that got an AFL opportunity who performed really well and I think that's a big part of our role as well, to make sure that we're developing guys.

Joyce on… Cillian Bourke’s promising start to his footy life

It's been fantastic having Cillian come in.

He's already got some great attributes with his speed, his power, his competitiveness, and he's really wanting to learn. He's wanting to develop his craft and his fundamentals of the game, so he's slotted in well.

I think even going from week one to week two, he's developed strongly and we're really excited about what we might be able to do with him for both the short-term and the medium-to-long-term.

Joyce on… the form of Setterfield and Tsatas

As it’s been said, ‘Setters’ is just such an amazing character and every time in the last 18 months that he's played via the VFL, he's been terrific for the group.

His attitude's always been strong, his performances have been strong. He’s certainly built his game in the last couple of weeks, obviously an AFL emergency as recent as last week.

You just know whatever task he gets, you can fully trust him to be able to carry that out.

For ‘Lij’ coming back into the VFL, his game over the weekend was great. He drove his legs really well, some of his transition work was strong as well, so we're looking at trying to keep building out his game to get him another opportunity at AFL level.

Joyce on… throwing the magnets around

I think you're always trying to find a way - with the list that you've got - to try and maximise that versatility and also to look at players’ strengths and where they can potentially help to round us out.

We’ve had Kayle Gerreyn go down back and he was great on the weekend, we’ve had Matt Guelfi push up onto a wing at different stages, we’ve even had Jayden Nguyen go up forward and then get an opportunity there in the AFL side.

Obviously some guys are able to play multiple roles which is awesome, and it just gives some more flexibility to the list and more opportunity for the boys to get in at AFL level in multiple positions.