ESSENDON
Two goals down at half time, at home, to the side sitting thirteenth. That was the hole, and the Royals climbed out of it in under eight minutes.
Altona City came to Cross Keys Reserve on Friday night with three wins from twenty-two games and spent most of the first half looking like a team with nothing to lose, because they had nothing to lose. Jordan Lam put them ahead in the 15th minute and Thomas Biss made it two in the 22nd, and for a long stretch after that the visitors were comfortable in a way that no one in red had accounted for. The half-time whistle went with the scoreboard reading 0-2 and the sort of silence around the ground that tells you everyone is doing the same arithmetic.
What came back out after the break was the same eleven players. Not a single change, no tactical reshuffle to point at afterwards, nothing that lets you credit the turnaround to anything other than the group deciding the game was not finished. That is worth sitting with for a moment, because it is the most impressive part of the night.
Frank Mulhern started it in the 51st minute, getting to the ball ahead of the goalkeeper as he came out, going round him and rolling it into an empty net. Four minutes later Dean Clarke levelled it, converting from the spot. Four minutes after that, Marcus Kotronis broke through the middle, took it into the area and finished, and by the time he had turned to run at the corner the entire team was already chasing him.
Three goals in seven minutes and fifty-six seconds. The scoreboard operator, for what it is worth, could not keep up, and the graphics on the stream were still catching up with the score a full twenty seconds after each one went in.
Altona’s response was mostly disciplinary. They finished with seven of the nine yellow cards shown, five of them after the hour mark, and made five substitutions to Essendon’s one. Josh Markovski came on for Kotronis in the 72nd minute, which meant the man who scored the winner watched the last twenty minutes from the bench while the side he had just put in front held on without much alarm.
The result keeps the Royals third on 44 points from 23 games, and it keeps the season alive in a way that a draw would not have. It is worth being clear about the shape of the run-in, though. Malvern City sit top on 49 and Goulburn Valley Suns second on 48, and both of them have games in hand from postponements that get made up in the catch-up round this weekend. Essendon have a bye. The gap cannot be closed this weekend and it can quite easily grow.
Three fixtures remain after that: away to Eastern Lions on 14 August, home to Keilor Park on 21 August, and away to Moreland City on 29 August. Nine points are available and the Royals will probably need most of them, with results elsewhere going the right way, to finish above where they currently sit.
The numbers underneath all this are the interesting part. Essendon have scored 57 goals this season, more than any other side in the division, including both teams above them. They have also conceded 35, which is ten more than Malvern and four more than Goulburn Valley. That combination is exactly how a team ends up two down at home to the thirteenth-placed side and then wins the match anyway. It is entertaining, it is not especially comfortable, and across three remaining games against sides in the bottom half it is the thing most likely to cost them.
Six games unbeaten now, with four wins and two draws in that stretch. Whatever else the run-in brings, this group has shown it does not need a scoreline to be going its way to keep playing.