Essendon opposition and team offence coach Rob Harding has detailed the remarkable lengths he takes in analysing upcoming opponents.
Much of Harding’s life is dedicated to forensically picking apart countless games and he revealed the extent of his job on The Essential Listen on Thursday.
“The volume of games I watch is large. I’ll generally watch each game at some point over the week or over the following weeks,” Harding said.
“For our next opposition I will watch at least their last four games in full and go back through a fair bit of detail on each of those.
“That’s the level I’m comfortable doing, some people would do less than that, I feel that that’s the number I need to do the job the way I do it.”
Plenty of time is dedicated to immediately upcoming games, but Harding said it is crucial to keep an eye on matches further in the future while he continues to assess the Bombers’ own performances.
“I’ll start watching Sydney this afternoon for next week and then I’ll plough through some Sydney stuff over the next couple of days, we’ve got a five-day break after Geelong so it’s a quick turnaround this week.
“In the preceding weeks if I know we’ve got Sydney in a month’s time and I’m watching a game involving them, but I might be watching someone else, I’ll keep a bit of an eye on what Sydney are doing as well.
“After we play, I’ll review our game as well from an offence perspective, so there’s a bit of chopping and changing.”
Harding has become one of the league’s household names in opposition strategy and analysis following stints at North Melbourne, Geelong (including the 2011 premiership season) and Adelaide before arriving at The Hangar with John Worsfold.
He has traversed a significant transition period for analysis in his time in the industry and he provided an insight into the way the job has evolved in recent years.
“Opposition analysts used to be out on the road and this is how I started, we were out on the road every week flying from state to state watching different games.
“We now get four camera angles of every game so the more the vision got better, the less you needed to be actually at the games live and clubs started using their opposition analyst more on game day themselves.
“You went from watching 100/120 games live a year to still watching great volume – a little bit more off the vision – but being able to input things into our strategy and our game plan based on what you’d seen elsewhere.”
Harding will once again settle in next to Worsfold in the coaches box at the MCG on Sunday when the Bombers take on the Cats.
