Essendon and our fans, particularly since the supplements saga, have been easy targets. This is another example where we will give the football media & BigFooty a good week or so of discussion, ‘observations’ and criticism. That’s fine.
The booing today (as it is in most situations!) was unsavoury, definitely. We will never know (unless we interview all the few thousand and the other sheep in the crowd responsible) if it was the umpiring or Pendlebury himself. Everyone will have their theories on it but we’ll never know.
Pendlebury and his team got the win today. I think that’s all they are really going to care about. I thought he was really respectful in his speech after the game but with Buckley (rightly or wrongly) bringing it to attention... it will dominate headlines for the next few years when the attention should probably be on Collingwood’s win instead. But now we will have to listen to the moral compasses of Gerard Whateley, Mark Robinson and your average BigFooty poster (with a conveniently blank memory of their own clubs poor crowd behaviour) for the next week discuss it.
We’ll also never know if the bad umpiring decisions (or lack of decisions) cost us in the end... but if we won a game in similar circumstances I could definitely understand the frustration from the opposition.