A personal reflection on what it means to support Essendon through difficult times. Don The Stat explores community, loyalty, resilience and why the Essendon Football Club is about far more than wins and losses.

Once a club reaches this point, everything becomes exposed. It’s going to expose who’s there to work hard and who’s going through the motions. It will expose who will go the extra yards to improve their game and who’s looking to expand their bank balance. At its worst, it’s going to set player against player, coach against coach, fan against fan. This will be stoked by an ever more rabid media, whose raison d'etre is to feed these conflicts for clicks, outrage and relevance.

There's doom and gloom here if you want it. There's positivity here if you want it. To me the reality is that we're doing exactly what we needed to do, hit the draft, play the kids, develop them and get them to 50-60 games as quickly as we can whilst embedding the way we want to play.

“Old Essendon” shouldn’t be a divided club, board challenges and instability. It’s Jack Jones giving tours of The Hangar to fans until his final days, , because he wanted people to love Essendon Football Club as much as he did, it’s Michael Long standing up against racism with his club united behind him