VelvetSledge
Moderator
- May 24, 2007
- 17,493
- 35,308
- AFL Club
- Essendon
- Other Teams
- Liverpool FC, Melbourne Storm
- Moderator
- #1
I know Carlisle isn't playing, I made this banner months ago and really didn't want to make a new one
ESSENDON BOMBERS
Arguably the single most lackluster, disgusting, pitiful effort we’ve seen from an Essendon side in a long, long time.
The Bombers were completely fisted from the outset, with GWS kicking the first 3 goals of the game. For perspective, the Bombers had matched that by 3 quarter time. Three goals, in three quarters. Pathetic.
Individual performances from senior midfielders have been brought into stark, dazzling light, with spotfires being lit firmly on Zach Merrett, David Myers, Dyson Heppell, and David Zaharakis. More to come on that further down.
Dylan Shiel started his career in red and black in decent fashion. He played well enough to be considered in our bests, which doesn’t say a lot.
Saad was excellent, and was quite easily our best player on the day, even if he was beaten one on one a few times.
Hurley looked completely out of sorts, and Ambrose was exposed as way too small to be a key defender.
McKenna celebrated St Patricks day too much, and everything he touched turned to s**t.
Stringer tried hard. 7 tackles and 1 goal, but that would be considered a great effort considering how the rest of the team played.
There’s more to be said about this bullshit performance, but have a look at the rant for that.
GWS GIANTS 16.16 112 def. ESSENDON BOMBERS 14.10 40
Lol jesus christ
BEST: Saad, Shiel, Me for sitting through that garbage
GOALS: Langford 2, Baguley, Francis, Stringer
INJURIES: My broken heart and shattered TV screen
REPORTS: Nil
--------
ST KILDA SAINTS
Escaped by the absolute skin of their teeth against a Gold Coast side that some are tipping to go through 2019 without a win.
After copping long-term injuries to Dan Hannebery, Dylan Roberton, and Jake Carlisle, the Saints were under immense pressure to perform in one of the rare games this season where they will go in as favourites.
A nervy, tentative performance resulted in a one-point margin by the end of the final term, where the scoreline teetered between the two teams continuously.
With this in mind, the final minutes were marred by an obvious missed free kick on the wing that would have resulted in a Gold Coast Inside 50, with Peter Wright having a solid aerial marking game. There’s no real way to have known if this was a factor in the final result, but it was a glaring error from the umpire.
The Saints started disappointingly, letting the Suns kick 4 goals early, before goals to new Saints Matt Parker and Dean Kent evening things up.
While they came away with a win, it was not convincing at all; a one point win against Gold Coast only has one positive – four points.
Still, better than our performance.
“This club is ****ed!”
ST KILDA SAINTS 13.7 85 def. GOLD COAST SUNS 13.6 84
BEST: Ross, Billings, Steven, Newnes, Bruce, Steele, McKenzie
GOALS: Bruce 3, Membrey, Parker 2, Long, Sinclair, Lonie, Gresham, Kent, Steele
INJURIES: Nil
REPORTS: Nil
ESSENDON EMERGENCIES
Brandon Zerk-Thatcher, Jordan Ridley, Zac Clarke, Jayden Laverde
ST KILDA EMERGENCIES
Hunter Clark, Ben Long, Darragh Joyce, Lewis Pierce
------
ESSENDON INS: Darcy Parish
ESSENDON OUTS: Jordan Ridley, My Faith
ST KILDA INS: Blake Acres, Nathan Brown, Rowan Marshall
ST KILDA OUTS: Ben Long, Darragh Joyce, Lewis Pierce
Just when you think that the club has acknowledged its failure last week, and has let the world know that they're embarrassed too, we cop this. This absolute spit in the face. There was one player who went at 100% disposal efficiency last week. Jordan Ridley. There were maybe 5 players who looked like they were trying last week. Ridley was one of them. Surely, we thought that we would see wholesale changes. Baguley was atrocious last week and didn't look to be playing a role at all. Myers had a shocker. Merrett was insulting. And yet, one change. And one that no-one saw coming. The quotes from Essendon fans all over social media probably said enough.
This ****ing club.
St Kilda weirdly dropped Ben Long, alongside Darragh Joyce and Lewis Pierce, bringing in the experienced duo of Blake Acres and Nathan Brown. Last time Brown played Essendon he hit Adam Saad 15 metres off the ball like the thug he is and I hope he stops in a tiny puddle in the bathroom when he has fresh socks on. Or is inconvenienced by his car keys not being where he remembered them. Or if he has a really annoying hangnail, I hope he can't pull it off without it going further up his finger and stinging like a bitch. Also Rowan Marshall is in the ruck.
Brown is a grub.
ESSENDON BOMBERS - #7 - ZACH MERRETT
Deary me. Zach Merrett, vice captain, and one of the best young mids in the game. Dangerous up forward, a brilliant accumulator of the ball, and a strong bodied tackler, who comes out of nowhere to wrap up the most lethal mids in the game. By all accounts, he should be fresh after having a very slightly interrupted pre-season. And then, we had last Sunday.
Sure, there’s been a story released in The Age saying that he played with a virus. All is well there, okay, fair enough. A virus in 32 degree weather, under immense pressure, your performance wouldn’t be that great. The question needs to be raised from therein though; why in the **** was he playing in the first place?! If a bloke of that much importance isn’t 100%, you don’t take him into Round 1. His performance was luckluster to a point where he has been the victim of pointed attacks all week. Countless videos of him barely raising an arm to stop a running opponent. Pictures of him, hands on hips, not going with his direct opposition. 16 touches, well down on his average, and no impact on the scoreboard at all.
If it is true that he was dealing with a virus, and we had a 100% healthy Darcy Parish in the magoos, then there needs to be questions asked of the selection team. That was an absolute miss of the highest order, a proper embarrassment to the club. The silver lining to this is that Zach is one of the more driven and strong-willed young men you’re likely to meet, and he won’t want to take the criticism he’s been copping all week lying down. Even if he gets a tag this week, watch for him to fire up and run through the middle with far more ferocity than was shown against the Giants.
ESSENDON BOMBERS - #11 - DAVID ZAHARAKIS
Having a nice laugh after the siren are we, Zaka? That’s not on. After a dismal, disgusting performance, where, admittedly, he wasn’t our worst, to have a laugh and a smile after the final siren is a full blown spit in the face to 70,000 Essendon members and countless other supporters. We deserve far better than that, and I’m sure that David has now been well informed of the majority of fans’ opinions on that.
That’s the problem with the AFL cameras, they’ll get you every time. Maybe the players weren’t aware of how disgraceful they looked out there. Maybe it took a full re-watch of their efforts until they sat up and thought, “Oh. Okay”. Listening to Zaka on SEN this week, and you could tell that he had a deep regret, which is shared among the playing group. Perhaps they were drinking their own bath-water, but what gave them the right to have a bath in the first place? We haven’t exactly had any success in the past 18 years. We haven’t won a final since 2004. Why are we getting ahead of ourselves?
A leader like Zaka shouldn’t be smiling after that s**t show. Hopefully he’s learnt his lesson now, and we see some more two-way running this week.
ST KILDA SAINTS - #27 - JOSH BRUCE
Not much to really write about Josh Bruce; he’s just dangerous. At his best, he’s one of the better tall forwards in the comp, and given he has his kicking boots on, he could quite easily slot 4 or 5. Given that we were exposed last week by a bloke with one leg and a knee being held together by scotch tape and dreams, this could be a serious concern. Michael Hurley was well off his best last week (which doesn’t say much, as the whole team was), but when he’s on song, he’s the best man-on-man defender in the league. He’s also one of the prouder men amongst our group, and would have been mortified with his performance against the Giants.
With Bruce playing relatively well, he could be running high on confidence. With him alongside another strong bodied forward in Tim Membrey, and the fleet-footed Jade Gresham crumbing their spills, the Saints forward line isn’t entirely toothless. We can’t have our defence playing like princesses.
ST KILDA SAINTS - #6 - SEBASTIAN ROSS
The Watson genes run through Ross, which is evidenced by his insane ball winning capability. With this in mind, there are no shortage of ball-winners in the red and black too. With Ross and Steven going head to head with players such as Heppell, Shiel, Merrett and BIG DAVID MYERS YEAAAH, we should be seeing a solid midfield battle. Seb is a quality mid with a strong body, solid disposal, and is a strong clearance player. He is one of only a few players at St Kilda who I would like at Essendon.
A tough as nails, hard as a cats head, he’s a pure mid who I find seriously underrated. He will most likely nail up over 30+ touches, but it’s up to our boys to make sure that those touches don’t do much.
A new addition this year; The Golden Kipfler celebrates the spuddiest player on the opposing side.
Perhaps a controversial pick for this week’s Spud nomination. I’m not one to revel in rumour and innuendo (this is a giant lie, I ****ing live for that s**t), but the whispers surrounding a certain big name off-season recruit have progressively become louder and louder, to the point where it’s like sticking your head inside the Queen Mary’s foghorn. Dear old Dan, who punished his body for years up in the Harbour City, coming away with the game’s greatest team prize. He’s got to the point where he may as well be made of stale beef jerky and Pocky sticks, and yet he’s somehow got this poor club to give him a four year, $800K p.a. deal. Somehow, he’s had four medicals (yes, FOUR), and they still agreed to sign him on this deal. As now, he’s yet to play for the Saints, with coach and perennial dead-man-walking Alan Richardson taking to Melbourne radio to state that he needs to be rebuilt, akin to perhaps the Terminator, or Triple H’s dicky quad in 2002. This is something that has not just got under the skin of the Saints fans; it’s burrowed under their fat, muscle, right through the bone, and now it’s swimming around inside the marrow. I understand the upside to Dan Hannebery. At his best, he was a top ten player in the league, but those days have long since gone. He hasn’t been at his best in years, and for a club so far off the mark in terms of progress towards a flag, for St Kilda to go so hard for him makes little to absolutely no ****ing sense. With this in mind, his now supposed behaviour since coming to Melbourne have not helped his new club in any aspect whatsoever. With his not-so-quiet stepping away from the leadership group, those nose beer rumours have grown again, and it’s going to be hard to see any positives coming from old mate Dan any time soon. I hope, for St Kilda’s sake, that he can get on the right path in terms of his recuperation from injury soon. As for his supposed behaviour off-season... Take this L, Dan. This week’s Golden Kipfler nominee.
Round 2 Nomination for the Golden Kipfler
Dan Hannebery, St Kilda
Jesus f***ing Christ. What in the blue hell was that.
Arguably the most limp-dicked, soft-boiled, half-cocked, explosive-diarrhoea inducing, projectile-vomit covered lump of festering ballsack that this ****ing club has dished up in the past few years. I’m not a religious man, but I was praying for the sweet embrace of God (or Satan, not picky) to relieve me from the nightmare that was Round ****ing One of 2019. From this day onwards, to be known as “HolyHotDicksFromHellWhatTheShitWasThat Day”.
From the get go, the tone was set. New boy Dylan Shiel sprayed an easy shot in the first few minutes, and it all went **** up from there. We were lifeless.
The Giants were missing Kelly and Ward, their best mids, and still completely obliterated us in the stoppages. We wilted like a flower in 46 degree heat. Like a cucumber you cut in half and chuck in the oven for a bit. Like a $5 bag of spinach that you put in a pan and it dissolves into about a fistful of sloppy green s**t. We paid big money on that spinach, and it dissolved to s**t. We part with our hard earned dollars to support the club, and we get a big old horse dong in the ear for reward.
What the ****?
We should have lost that by 90 points. We DESERVED to lose by triple figures.
Seeing players after the loss smiling and laughing with their opponents made me unreasonably angry. Especially when we put our own hard-earned dollars into the club with memberships, merchandise, sponsorships, even those little stupid badges that you really don’t understand but the kids love and if the kids love it that’s all that matters because at least they’ll be happy at the end of the game because they don’t quite understand what’s really going on but that doesn’t matter they have Dyson Heppell’s head on their scarf and that makes them happy which is great because that will cushion the fact that I WAS ****ING ROPEABLE AT THAT BULLSHIT. WE ARE BETTER THAN THIS. I think. Maybe we aren’t?
So far, the bath water has been well and truly consumed, urinated out, and consumed again. Why are we so caught up in our own hype when we have done precisely ******* NOTHING in the past 15 years? Scratch that, we’ve done nothing since 2000. No flag means we’ve done nothing. In this game, that’s the only measure of success. The yardstick is a flag, and everything else is a failure. So we’re in our 19th year of being a deadset ****ing failure. No more. This is a club that is so much bigger than this bullshit. We’re one of the biggest, and we should be the best. The failures seen throughout the past near-two decades should be long gone by now. The clumsy Sheedy sacking. The Knights disaster. The absolute worst thing that could have happened because we had a boys club with no proper background-checking, properly breaking the back of this club and testing the patience of all of it’s supporters and members for years. YEARS. Now we find ourselves in an era of prosperity, with the biggest sponsorship deal in the game’s history signed. An upgrade to an already world-class facility coming. Excellent player signings, year on year. The fans were excited, we were keen to get into 2019, and after the awesome finish to our year in 2018, we were primed to come out and give Round 1 a good old crack.
What did we do instead?
s**t the bed. Didn’t try. Like walking in on Margaret Thatcher naked. Completely flaccid.
And then, Thursday happened.
A team which has been belted to the tune of 72 points decided to make one change, ditching one of the few players who actually played well for the expected Darcy Parish. Not saying Darce doesn’t deserve to be in the team; he dominated last week in the VFL and should 100% be in the side. But for Jordan Ridley to be ditched after a great performance? Where there were players who showed a small percentage of the effort that Rids did, and are still placed directly into the Starting 22? Directly spitting right into our face? And then pissing on us? What in the actual s**t? Where do our selection lads get their kicks? How in the **** is that a good decision? I go back to my original first sentence.
Jesus f***ing Christ. What in the blue hell was that.
Something different this week, as no-one nominated to rant. Thanks to Stopher for the idea!
A quality selection of some of the BigFooty Board's best reactions to last week's shitshow. Take it away!
No-one from the St Kilda board wanted to write anything this week; the other side section may not end up working.
ROUND 21, 2018
Marvel Stadium
10/8/18
ESSENDON BOMBERS 18.14 122
def.
ST KILDA SAINTS 11.13 79
---------
ESSENDON BEST: McDonald-Tipungwuti, Merrett, McGrath, McKenna, Myers, Heppell
ESSENDON GOALS: McDonald-Tipungwuti 5, Fantasia, Stringer, Myers, Langford 2, Heppell, Francis, Hooker, McKenna, Smith
SAINTS BEST: Ross, Steele, Armitage, Billings
SAINTS GOALS: Billings, Gresham, Lonie 2, Freeman, Newnes, Long, Marshall, Paton
---------
CHANGES SINCE THEN:
ESSENDON OUTS: Colyer, McNiece, Hooker, Goddard
ESSENDON INS: Shiel, Ambrose, McKernan, Guelfi
SAINTS OUTS: Armitage, Pierce, Freeman, Long, Paton, Carlisle, Rice
SAINTS INS: Kent, Bruce, Parker, Battle, Wilkie, Savage, Dunstan
MELBOURNE:
TV: FOX Footy (LIVE at 4.30pm AEDST), FOXTEL Now (LIVE at 4.30pm AEDST)
RADIO: Triple M, 3AW, ABC
MOBILE: AFL Live Official App with LIVE Pass (Unmetered on Telstra Mobile Network)
SYDNEY:
TV: FOX Footy (LIVE at 4.30pm AEDST), FOXTEL Now (LIVE at 4.30pm AEDST)
RADIO: Macquarie Sports Radio
MOBILE: AFL Live Official App with LIVE Pass (Unmetered on Telstra Mobile Network)
ADELAIDE:
TV: FOX Footy (LIVE at 4.00pm ACDST), FOXTEL Now (LIVE at 4.00pm ACDST)
RADIO: -
MOBILE: AFL Live Official App with LIVE Pass (Unmetered on Telstra Mobile Network)
PERTH:
TV: FOX Footy (LIVE at 1.30pm AWDST), FOXTEL Now (LIVE at 1.30pm AWDST)
RADIO: 6PR, ABC
MOBILE: AFL Live Official App with LIVE Pass (Unmetered on Telstra Mobile Network)
BRISBANE:
TV: FOX Footy (LIVE at 3.30pm AQT), FOXTEL Now (LIVE at 3.30pm AQT)
RADIO: Macquarie Sports Radio
MOBILE: AFL Live Official App with LIVE Pass (Unmetered on Telstra Mobile Network)
TASMANIA:
TV: FOX Footy (LIVE at 4.30pm AEDST), FOXTEL Now (LIVE at 4.30pm AEDST)
RADIO: Triple M (Regional), ABC, AFL Nation
MOBILE: AFL Live Official App with LIVE Pass (Unmetered on Telstra Mobile Network)
DARWIN:
TV: FOX Footy (LIVE at 3.00pm NTT), FOXTEL Now (LIVE at 3.00pm NTT)
RADIO: ABC, AFL Nation
MOBILE: AFL Live Official App with LIVE Pass (Unmetered on Telstra Mobile Network)
We’re going to need to see a seriously improved effort. The team has been smashed from pillar to post all week by the media, and they need to show something. I can’t help but feel that they’ll come out breathing fire. We need to silence the critics and show some dominance against a side that should be bottom two this year. The Saints were very (very) lucky to come away with a win last week against the fledging Gold Coast Suns at home, and coming against a side like this, they should cop it sweet from the Dons.
Hopefully.
Just. F***ing. Win.
Please.
Bombers by 66.
Last edited by a moderator:
