AFL Rohan Connolly Essendon Bombers Brad Scott

Essendon right now could announce a reincarnated Norm Smith, or an AFL version of Sir Alex Ferguson or Bill Belichick as its new coach and still be the subject of much social media derision, such is the Bombers’ standing as a club now with much of the football world.

More than two decades of entrenched mediocrity will do that to even one-time powerhouses. And the hordes are feasting on the Bombers’ announcement of former North Melbourne coach and more lately AFL general manager of football Brad Scott as coach.

To which Essendon’s response should be “go your hardest, suckers”. Because the club, in my view, has got it absolutely spot on and made a very good coaching appointment.

Scott is a man not only with the required experience and political nous to cope with a club as fraught with factions and encumbered by the weight of history as Essendon has been, but more importantly still, simply a very good coach, whose North Melbourne teams over his 10 seasons in charge were seldom anything less than ultra-competitive and regularly punched above their weight.

Former Kangaroos coach Brad Scott. Darrian Traynor/Getty Images

The Roos made two preliminary finals under Scott in 2014-15, knocking over a much stronger version of Essendon, then Geelong to do so on the first occasion, the second time beating Richmond then the Swans in Sydney.

In nine completed seasons under Scott, North Melbourne played finals four times, and finished just outside finals contention in either ninth or 10th spot on another four occasions. That’s just one occasion when September wasn’t a possibility until the last possible moment.

Plenty of North Melbourne fans seem to be arguing Scott should have done better with the talent at his disposal, but that’s not a view shared by most who were on the inner sanctum at the time.

The Roos, even in those preliminary final years, lacked sufficient depth, underscored when they started the 2016 season on a nine-game winning streak, then won just three of the remaining 13 games after a spate of injuries, including to key players like Shaun Higgins and Jarrad Waite.

Brad Scott during his time at North Melbourne. Daniel Pockett/AFL Media/Getty Images

Even some of Scott’s biggest critics at Arden Street, and there were plenty after the messy retirements of the likes of Brent Harvey, Drew Petrie, Nick Dal Santo and Michael Firrito at the end of that same season, believe his results overall were good given what he had to work with.

“He simply never had the cattle,” said one former assistant to Scott after the Essendon job had been announced on Thursday night. “If he’d had the sort of lists and resources of the clubs he was competing against, I reckon he would have got better results than most of them did.”

Those arguing Scott’s three-and-a-half seasons now out of the coaching bonfire damage his capabilities are conveniently ignoring his time at the AFL, first as head of AFL Victoria since 2020 then for the last 12 months as general manager of football.

They are roles which have given him the perfect view both of the development pathways to AFL he has helped shape, and more recently, valuable intellectual property about not only the current state of the game, but its likely path in the near future given statistical and coaching trends among the 18 clubs.

Scott’s personal qualities will also be an asset in the recently-troubled environment at The Hangar into which he is now headed.

Former coaching colleagues speak of an accomplished “salesman”, who will be able to get what has been a badly-fractured club on the one page. At the same time, however, they stress, Scott will set high standards and drive them relentlessly.

Personal relationships won’t be allowed to get in the way of business. And that should be music to the ears of anyone who matters at Essendon, a club which has for far too long allowed alliances and personal agendas to overrule the best interests of the club.

That is a tendency the broom being pushed by new president Dave Barham hopes to sweep away, but neither do those connections and the influence they wield disappear overnight.

Indeed, there’s arguably a lot more work to be done off the field at Essendon than on it with a new chief executive still to be appointed, three more board positions still to be filled after the recent appointment of former player Andrew Welsh, and the results of the external review of the entire club’s operations still to be handed down.

That means Scott’s intellect and negotiating skills forged during a decade in charge of a senior AFL club will be crucial in helping steer that path more quickly.

That is unfortunate for another candidate like Adem Yze, who has the talent to become a senior AFL coach but hasn’t had that similar experience, while the dangers of appointing James Hird might not have been his fault, but were pretty obvious.

Essendon is determined to reset its course, lose much of the insularity which has held it back in so many ways over the past couple of decades, and drag itself into a more contemporary mindset. Scott’s appointment will help expedite that process.

None of which the many naysayers on social media or in newspaper “readers’ comments” sections will have any interest in pondering and processing.

But so what? Scott and Essendon know the only way to silence the knockers will be to deliver the “Ws” in the results column. And this appointment I think gives them the best possible chance of doing just that.