ESSENDON played the role of grim reaper with Sydney’s AFL Women’s finals chances as the Bombers snapped an eight-game losing streak to knock off the Swans by three points in a dour affair at Coffs Harbour.

Horrible weather in New South Wales’ north east coast meant the game itself was delayed, but once out on the field, the Bombers reacted the best to the tough conditions to come away with the 2.2 (14) to 1.5 (11) victory. In a game that had threats of lightning and storms, Essendon was able to finish the season on a high and leapfrog rivals Collingwood into 14th spot on the AFLW ladder.

For the Bombers, coach Nat Wood said the players did well to cope with the challenging conditions given it was the group’s first rain delay situation. The coaching staff was “transparent” with the players about what needed to be done to keep the preparation as normal as possible, and the group reponded.

“We made sure we had that transparency with the players and told them when to have some down time and when to get ready to go,” Wood said.

“Then our focus was to be really strong around the ball, Sydney are a good contested team, good clearance team, we knew that we’ve got some good balance around the clearances and we thought if we could equalise or win contested possession and clearance numbers we could put ourselves right in the game and that paid out today.”

Coming into the match Essendon had 14th spot on the line, a little bit of a far cry than Sydney’s guaranteed finals place with a victory. However at the end of the day, Wood said the players were determined to finish strong, and while the year has been “quite varied, quite difficult at times”, she was pleased with how the players stuck to task in Round 12.

“We’ve had some games where we were far from our best whether you’re winning or losing, we just weren’t really turning up for four quarters and being strong competitors and applying a lot of pressure,” Wood said. “Sydney obviously had their situation, but our focus has been for the last month to really come back to a number of our trademarks, a number of the behaviours that really set up our values and who we are and making sure that we get that right and we saw today as another opportunity to get to work on that.

“That was the main focus for us, and I just said to the playing group that if Sydney had of snuck a goal in that last quarter then that wouldn’t have changed that we did turn up, we were more of ourselves today, the players are really connected, they were really dialed in, so really proud that we kept being able to build our identity all be it a challenging year for us.”

Sydney coach Scott Gowans described the loss as a “pothole” in his club’s journey to the top of the AFL Women’s competition.

“It was a contested game of footy, we gave great effort but we had 100 tackles in that game and we just tried to get the game on our terms a number of times but Essendon just stuck fat I suppose and really just for the game on their terms more than we did,” he said.

“We ended up with more territory and more inside 50s in the whole thing but sometimes in these conditions its just that ability to contest to contest and we probably made some errors in those areas, and we probably got the territory in that last quarter but just couldn’t find the goal we needed to break them open.

“Look credit to Essendon I thought they were fantastic, it’s disappointing and we know we’re on a journey but the journey’s hit a pothole today.”