Essendon may have dominated the stats sheet, but blew its opportunities in front of goal in its 26-point loss to Carlton.

Senior Coach Brad Scott said the raw numbers which illustrated the dominance in a losing effort wasn't something he had seen before, having 20 more inside 50s, nearly 60 more handballs, 25 more hitouts and 59 more uncontested possessions.

"I thought Carlton were very polished, I thought their efficiency, they converted their opportunities certainly a lot better than we did. Credit to the way they were able to capitalise on those opportunities," Scott said. 

"We knew Carlton are a very good contested team, very good stoppage team, territory dominance was going to be pretty important in the game.

"Clearly Carlton deserve their win, but I thought our guys laid the foundation to give ourselves the opportunity to – I wouldn't say dominate the game, but we certainly dominated parts without converting on the scoreboard. 

"You don't need me to reel off the stats, you can look them up yourselves, but some of them, I've never seen in a loss. But that's on us, it's two weeks in a row we've been really poor converting our opportunities forward of centre."

The Bombers kicked 9.16 from their 60 inside 50s, having held the Blues to just 40 of their own.

"It's not only the kicking execution and kicking for goal, it's our forward-50 connection, quality shots versus rushed shots. It's not just the last kick inside 50 or the kick inside 50 (itself), some of the build-up, we would have liked to have executed better than we did," Scott said.

"There's a whole range of factors, but it probably feeds into as well that we didn't connect well inside 50 therefore it hit the ground and they cleaned it up. You look at the ground-ball contested numbers, a lot of it came from that."

Scott did not have an update on the subbed-out Will Setterfield, who slipped in the fourth term and appeared to injure his knee, a troublesome area for the Bomber.