Essendon sought advice from two experienced advocates before deciding to accept midfielder Brendon Goddard’s one match ban from the match review panel.

Goddard will miss Sunday’s blockbuster against Collingwood after an early guilty plea reduced his sanction to one game for rough conduct against Port Adelaide’s Kane Cornes.

General Manager Football Operations Rob Kerr said there was strong consideration giving to fighting the penalty.

“The real difficulty with this is that it was classed as intentional because it was off the ball,” Kerr said.

“We felt that the two weeks was a little disproportionate to the offence that occurred and we spoke to two experienced advocates about trying to challenge the charge.”

“In their opinions we were going to really struggle to get the charge either thrown out or have it down graded.”

“The professional view that we got back from those advocates is that we were likely to lose if we went to the tribunal.”

Kerr said the club simply couldn’t find a strong enough case in order to fight the matter.

“There was a lot of discussion and we were trying to find ways we felt we could challenge successfully but couldn’t come up with any,” he said.

“We did find other similar incidents that hadn’t been cited in the past but under the guidelines you can only use incidents that are on the AFL DVD and they were not going to help us.”

Kerr said Goddard was frustrated he would be missing such a big clash for the club this weekend.

“Brendon is bitterly disappointed with it, “

“He obviously is mindful of his role in the team and it being a big game for us against Collingwood this weekend which is making it even more of a bitter pill to swallow.”