After last week’s galvanised win over GWS, top four fancy Hawthorn proved too powerful and potent for Essendon on Saturday in the form of a disparaging 93-point margin.

Despite a combative first 40 minutes of footy by a young Bombers outfit riding a wave of momentum from the week prior, the Hawks dominated possession and dictated the majority of the game from that point. 

Bombers Senior Coach Dean Solomon said his side were on the receiving end of a pretty direct lesson in high-level footy.

The full rundown from his post-game presser:

Solomon on… compliance

A good learning experience, I reckon. Our inability to defend uncontested marks has been, and is still an issue for us. 

It felt like, at times, our pressure and our tackle count was where we wanted them to be – obviously, opposition sides identify that, so then they own the ball by foot and you can't apply pressure. The next layer we need to work on is defending that as forwards, mids and defenders in unison. 

Force them wide, keep them wide, send them wide, we just can't do that at the moment. It was a fear coming to the game with 150 uncontested marks against us last time we played them, and it was the thing we identified, and ultimately they had 139 tonight. 

Solomon on… injury concerns

(Jordan Ridley) landed and felt something on the bottom of his foot, a tweak or a pull.

They're unsure what it is at the moment, but I don't think they're majorly concerned about anything, we'll have scans in the next day and identify what the problem is.  

For a young player (in Sully Robey) to go down like he did, he was in a fair bit of pain on the bench.

Obviously, we're concerned about him but fingers crossed we’ll get a good outcome there. Doctors seem to be reasonably positive it’s nothing too major, which is a good thing, but again, if he's sore or there's any risk, we won't be pushing him too hard for the moment.

Anything major has been ruled out - they’ve ruled out the ACL so there's nothing to that level - which is a great thing.  

‘Wicka’s got a bit of a hip pointer. He was sore initially but he freed up a bit and went back out, got going for a bit, but then we sort of decided with not much time to go, we'd ice him. Durham was a little bit sore towards the end as well so he went forward. 

Off a six-day turnaround we're a little bit sore, but there's no excuse for what we dished up today. We've got to get to work.

139 uncontested marks against – ‘Rids’ and ‘Robes’ (alone) aren't going to reduce that. That’s more down to our method. Would we love to have those players out there for the whole game, of course, but it's not to be, it's not an excuse.

Solomon on… Caddy and McGrath’s efforts

That’s the beauty of Nate as a 21-year-old. It was a bit lean for him early, we put him in some centre bounces, some midfield time late in the third, I think it was. He went back forward and had some impact.

It feels like Nate’s been around forever, but he's only in his third year. The ability to give him some exposure to the midfield will only compliment his game going forward. Seeing Kako go in the middle as well, they're made of the right stuff, these young guys.

To see (Nate) fight back throughout the game was a good thing. Obviously, it's been a tough week for him too, he's gone through a fair bit and it's reassuring that he's medically going to be absolutely okay.

I’ll have to go back and look at it again, holistically through the tape, but (Watson’s) a bloody good player. Look at their forward line, they've got some absolute weapons and they're potent.

Andy always fights. He fights hard, he's competitive, he's our Captain. I'll probably have to go back and get a good handle on it as I coached from the bench today but he had some good contests out there and held his own.

We’ll keep exposing all our players to opposition's best and if we need to go to our Captain, we'll do that.

Solomon on… prioritising the medium-to-long term 

It does take a lot of time. We've got 4 or 5 games left, we've been working on it and we've been getting to work on it. 

We saw a shift last week. We're going to be inconsistent at times, I mean, we've got 11 players in the first three years of AFL footy.

They’re working on their craft, they're trying to understand how it works, how the defensive system works in unison. But there's no doubt they're going to benefit from a big pre-season of learning and looking at this. We’ll keep working on it with the time that we've got.

It’s good exposure for this group to play against Hawthorn, they're on top of the ground at the moment, so this is great for our guys to identify what they do well and learn from that and strive to become that.

The stuff we're doing, a lot of the decisions we're making, the way that we're coaching, it's for the medium to long term. 

We've seen some growth. I know that the scoreboard doesn't suggest that as we go from a 90-point loss to Brisbane to a win last week, then back to 93 and we just spoke about that.

We’ve got to be more consistent in that (even) when the opposition asks us a question through a different method, especially with ball in hand, we've got to have the ability to reduce that.