Watson: Brad Scott in danger of losing senior Essendon players

Maybe Brad Scott was a genius.

Maybe his intention was to put the microscope firmly on the Essendon Football Club when he spoke post-game and used the word “demoralised”.

Because it certainly has inflamed the conversation around Essendon. It has added to what people already saw by the way the coach spoke.

What really surprises me in modern day football is that you have media managers - even when I was coaching at St Kilda - you would sit down with your media manager about the messaging before the press conference because you know what type of questions are going to be asked.

You’ve got time to think, pause and reflect about the language you might use.

I think he threw a lot of the team under the bus by what he had to say.

It was almost like he was disassociating himself with what he’d seen in the players and himself and what they’re trying to do.

The selfishness, the lack of desire to want to compete. Then to pick out the No.1 kid (Nate Caddy) and to embarrass and humiliate him publicly too about how demoralising it was that he missed that goal.

He just used the wrong word. He could have said: ‘we’re lacking in confidence’, ‘we’ve had the wind taken out of our sails’, ‘the edge is off’, ‘we’re a bit flat’. He could have said a lot of things publicly.

He appears to know what he was doing. You can have strong messaging behind the scenes, but publicly using that inflammatory type of wording it then leads everybody to make their own conclusions about where the club is at right now.

I just don’t think that was a clever way to go about it. Scott needs to have the older players along with him, he needs to build the older players as part of his vision with the younger players.

Because they are so influential in a football club.

There’s some work to be done in terms of the leadership of that group and bringing them along with the messaging that he wants to deliver to the younger players.

If you look at talent, if you look at skill, if you look at organisation, if you look at leadership, if you look at culture - right now Essendon appear from the outside to be on the low scale of all those things.

When the club announced Scott following their open search for a coach, I applauded it because I thought he would be a hard-nosed, defensive type of coach. I thought that’s what the club needed.

Essendon had been accused of being downhill skiers. Great when it worked but there was nothing underpinning it in terms of the defensive mechanisms of the game.

I thought he would implement that. I thought that was his one-wood. I thought that would be part of what he would bring. I misread that.

There has been no defensive mechanism that’s been apparent about the way he’s implemented his game plan.

He’s had four pre-seasons now to do that and it’s still not apparent.

You build a defence first which Essendon hasn’t been able to do.

Last year there were circumstances out of his control in some ways. But on 11 occasions they copped 100-plus points against in games. Defensively they were terrible.

They had weaker personnel at their disposal but if you continue to get belted by those margins every week for four years then history tells you that you are going to be under threat as a coach.

Now is the worst time to be rebuilding because you’ve got Tasmania about to suck all the best young talent out of the competition.

If I look at Essendon’s position right now, how many pieces are in place for them to be able to build what they might perceive to be a premiership team in seven years’ time?

They are at ground zero in their rebuild.

A dispirited organisation is what they look like right now.

He’s got a lot of work to do, Brad Scott. The number one thing is he has to bring the players along with him.