Young Bomber Nic Martin celebrates a goal during last Saturday’s win over Melbourne at Adelaide Oval. Photo: AFL MEDIA

Essendon’s supporter base is famously demanding, but after the worst couple of decades in the club’s history, even Bomber fans have learned to temper their expectations just a little.

Which is going to make the build up to one of the most highly-anticipated Anzac Day blockbusters against Collingwood in memory even more interesting than usual.

It’s unlikely even new Essendon coach Brad Scott and his support crew considered the prospect of the Bombers being 4-1 and second on the AFL ladder come this point of the season. So do the Dons now play it down or embrace the hype? Personally, if I were Scott, I’d be all for the latter.

It’s hard to get your head around just how unhappy a place the Essendon Football Club has been at times in recent years even since the calamity of the supplements scandal had been dealt with, players and staff disillusioned, let alone Bomber fans. So even this minor triumph via a promising start to 2023 is something to be cherished.

Scott already deserves plenty of praise for not only having so far successfully negotiated a highly politicised club environment, but in a short period already having engineered significant and clearly obvious attitudinal changes among his players.

What’s been perhaps the most impressive thing about Essendon’s effort to date has been its very orthodoxy, and that hasn’t often been the case with anything to do with this club for a long time.

Scott’s Bombers are getting the job done not as much through supreme individual performances or spectacular bursts of brilliance, but more via solid, team-orientated playing of the percentages, which is allowing the collective to achieve results above and beyond what pound for pound individual talents suggests should be possible relative to the opposition.

That was certainly the case on Saturday night for the Bombers with an undersized defence, undermanned forward set-up and a midfield group without the runs on the board of its opposition in conditions which clearly would have suited more the greater physical strength of Melbourne.

But attitude – and efficiency – is really taking the Dons somewhere under Scott.

For starters, the midfield is less about chasing kicks and more about working as a group, and skipper Zach Merrett, Darcy Parish and Dylan Shiel are all having more impact as a result. Contested ball has been a perennial Melbourne strength and a weakness for Essendon, but on Saturday the Bombers won that metric.

The Dons looked set to really struggle to score with the disastrous pre-season injury to best and fairest winner and leading goalkicker Peter Wright, compounded this weekend by Sam Weideman’s absence with concussion.

Yet even with another barometer in Jake Stringer kept relatively quiet, and up against what has been the best defence in the competition for some time, Essendon managed 29 scores shots and 104 points against the Demons in what became difficult conditions late.

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To put that effort in context, it was just the second time in 54 games since the start of 2021 that Melbourne had conceded three figures.

The Bombers scored from just on 50 per cent of their forward 50 entries against a team which last year ranked No. 2 for preventing scores per inside 50 at only 39.5 per cent. And they took 13 marks inside 50 against a team which last year ranked No.1 for conceding the fewest at an average of just 8.5.

Those numbers are just as significant as the individuals kicking those goals, like the increasingly mature and versatile Kyle Langford, or young midfielders Archie Perkins and Nick Martin, both of whom are gradually developing a harder edge to their games to work alongside their obvious skill.

The performance of the ruck tandem Sam Draper and Andrew Phillips, meanwhile, speaks for itself, both valuable not just at the stoppages but up forward. Phillips might be unfashionable-looking and hardly a stylist, but his assistance to a real star in Draper has been invaluable.

The defensive group continues to get the job done, too, despite often looking a little light on for height and physical strength yet currently ranking third for fewest points conceded.

Mason Redman and vice-captain Andy McGrath lead the way among a still largely-unheralded group, with Jordan Ridley, Jake Kelly, Jayden Laverde and Brandon Zerk-Thatcher supporting each other in equal measures, the latter now far more important not just in structural but morale terms than his 33-game profile would suggest.

Jye Caldwell is another in that bracket. Ditto Sam Durham. While Ben Hobbs is another solid midfield type yet to play in 2023 but almost certainly part of the Dons’ best 22 when fully fit.

That trio seem to epitomise the persona this Scott version of Essendon is trying to create. Consistent. Unrelenting in terms of effort. Resilient psychologically. They are traits about which the better clubs of the modern era scarcely think twice, so ingrained are they in DNA. But for Essendon, even those qualities are part of a learning process.

It’s almost like for a lot of Bombers, a light bulb has gone on, and with it the realisation of just how far off the pace of the competition this group has been at times, and the ground still to be made up.

Anzac Day for Scott’s Essendon will be a terrific test. It won’t start favourite against a really good team. Perhaps the occasion may get to a few in a still-young playing group. But the experience will be valuable nonetheless.

After periods of seeming little more than a soulless corporation, Essendon is again looking like a real football club, and playing like a football team with genuine spirit. And already you sense that these Bombers are really getting a taste for it.

This article first appeared at ESPN.