It was a view only reinforced over the next few seasons as the Dons slid steadily down the ladder, Kevin Sheedy's side routinely caught out for pace, hardness and skill in the engine room.

So there's a keen sense of irony that in the rebuilding of the Bombers under new coach Matthew Knights this season, it's precisely the same area of the ground that is rapidly becoming the cornerstone of an Essendon resurgence.

As the Dons have bounced back from a string of eight defeats with five wins and a narrow loss from their past six games, it's been the midfield leading the way, a unit opponents have found too difficult to counter with its balance of smart ruckwork, strength, speed and plenty of football smarts.

And not a little depth, either. At the start of 2008, with veterans Jason Johnson and Damien Peverill already told they would become second-stringers, it was the likes of Jason Winderlich and Alwyn Davey expected to become key men in a new-look engine room supervised by first-year assistant coach Scott Camporeale.

Instead, due to long-term injuries, that pair has barely been sighted. Bachar Houli, another likely prospect, got hurt. So did young gun David Myers. And Mark McVeigh, a real general in the centre square, has also been cut down, about to miss his third straight game.

But the Bomber midfield just bowls on regardless, propelled by a couple of familiar faces such as Jobe Watson and Brent Stanton, but also some like Sam Lonergan and Kyle Reimers, who at the beginning of this year would hardly have been seen as anything more than "bit" players.

There's Andrew Welsh, until this season a spare-parts man in either defence or midfield, thrown into the midfield mix in desperation against Hawthorn in round 11 in a run-with role, but over the past two months having become a lot more.

Andy Lovett returns against Melbourne today to add some more dash to the mix. Ricky Dyson does similarly. And the vastly improved Angus Monfries can also take a turn when he's not kicking goals and exerting forward line defensive pressure.

It's becoming a more than handy group, numerically and in quality. And it's being fed brilliantly by ruckman David Hille, in career-best form and a very popular tip for All-Australian selection.

Camporeale, himself only feeling his way in the coaching business in his first season as an assistant, is quietly satisfied with the jobs his young charges continue to get done.

"Obviously, our first half of the season wasn't great, and we lost a fair bit of personnel, which really hurts when you've got a young list, but from the Adelaide game (round 10) onwards, just with a few changes and a little bit of a different structure, things have really gone well," he says.

"Hille's in great form, and having a dominant ruckman is a real bonus, but when you also have four or five blokes like McVeigh, Welsh, Watson and Stanton all getting mid-20s disposals and four or five clearances each week, it's pretty hard for the opposition to match up.

"We've really upped the ante with our hard-ball wins. Our general clearance-rate has gone up considerably from the first six or seven games, when I think head-to-head, we only won the clearances in about two of those."

Senior coach Matthew Knights also this week pinpointed the Adelaide game as a real turning point, not just in terms of the win-loss ratio, but in the way his team, and midfield in particular, approached its football.

He's keen to dispel the widely held view that Essendon somehow changed its style in the face of some weekly beltings. The Bombers didn't suddenly become more defensive-minded. They've just learned on the job.

"I think as a whole team we got criticised for being unaccountable," Stanton says. "Getting that balance between offence and defence is probably the biggest thing we've come to realise and at the moment, it's paying off for us."

Knights believes his young onballers are fighting through tackles far better now. "Early in the season, we were getting pushed around, the ball was spilling out and the opposition were running away for easy goals. But we're learning to become stronger in the tackle and be more resilient when we've got the ball in combative situations," he says.

"We've been giving the players the same defensive action learning tools as we were pre-season. All they're doing is getting better at it."

And other aspects of the game, too. Watson and Hille are the AFL's premier ruck-rover combination, having combined 20 times this season for centre-bounce clearances, ahead of the likes of West Coast's Dean Cox and Matthew Priddis, and experienced Brisbane pair Jamie Charman and Simon Black.

Watson was already a renowned clearance player, but has become far more damaging with the improvement of his disposal, which is prolific at an average of 25, a massive 41 last week in the win over Collingwood.

Ditto Stanton, whose disposal numbers are roughly the same as last year, but whose effectiveness has increased dramatically. "I've worked fairly hard on it with Scott and Matthew, just trying to steady down in those last couple of steps before I kick, and it seems to be helping."

Welsh, one of the team elders these days at the grand old age of 25, says that improvement has been mirrored across the board.

"I think one of the big reasons the midfield is performing so well is that our skill level seems to be a lot higher," he says. "I think we've just worked that hard on the execution of our skills. 'Knighter' has been massive on it.

"We're not handballing behind players any more, we handball in front of them so they can run on to it. Same with the kicking. I think that's been a major part of the transformation."

The likes of Stanton and Watson have also been given considerable assistance by the rapid emergence of Reimers and Lonergan this season.

Now that the novelty of the precocious Reimers' orange boots has worn off somewhat, the football world is starting to appreciate his running, courage and football smarts. And Lonergan has come from nowhere. Dogged by injury, the young Tasmanian had played only one game in 2006. Now he's pivotal to the midfield equation with his hardness and work-rate.

"His dedication and hardness at the ball is a big trait for him," Stanton says. "He's a pretty strong guy, and he just takes the game on."

Says Welsh: "He just had a real mental mind shift over pre-season and trained really hard. He's a real hunter of the ball, like Simon Black, not someone who waits on the outside, he gets in and hunts it out. He's just what we need when we've got so many guys who are great at receiving and running and breaking the lines."

Then there's Welsh himself, whose string of opponents since the change of role mid-season have included Sam Mitchell, Priddis, Chris Judd, Rhys Palmer, Black, Luke Power, and last week, Scott Pendlebury. Welsh hasn't lowered his colours to any of them, and towelled a few.

"He's not only shutting blokes down, but getting high possessions and kicking goals," Camporeale says. "He's a real barometer for us. People talk about McVeigh in that sense, but I reckon 'Welshy' is another one of those guys who really steps up and takes the team with him. His running capacity is really good, he's one of the best kicks in the team, and he'd been thrown around a bit, it's been good just to find him a niche."

Welsh concedes his raging success in the new role might have surprised even him. "I'm really enjoying settling into a role week-in, week-out, which I probably haven't done in my whole career," he says.

"I think my endurance has always been there, but I've probably never used it as well as I could have. To play AFL, you've got to live and breathe it, and I probably wasn't living an elite sort of lifestyle.

"It's a total package, looking after your body. Things like Pilates. I used to hate it, never do it, but I've started seeing a guy off my own bat twice a week and it's been really beneficial. Just little things like that, diet, and thinking about your body 24 hours a day and not just a couple of days out from a game."

Welsh and Stanton are glowing about the influence of Camporeale, until the end of last season a teammate, and a former member of one of the great Carlton midfields featuring Greg Williams, Brett Ratten and Craig Bradley.

"He's an amazing thinker of the game," Welsh says. "He knows the running patterns and centre square set-ups, and he watches that much footage. The knowledge he's picked up not just from playing but in his first year as a coach is amazing."

"They're really coachable," Camporeale responds in kind of the midfield group. "They're always asking questions, always racking your brain for ideas."

And the former Blue, only fresh out of playing, is quickly discovering how much he enjoys passing them on. "Sometimes you get a bit animated, you sort of play through them at times," he laughs. "I wish I could still be out there, but I'm getting a real kick out of the way they're playing at the moment."

And it's safe to say, after a barren few years for Essendon and a midfield routinely pilloried, he's far from the only one.

ANALYSIS

MIDFIELD quality in AFL football is seen universally as an essential ingredient of team success. Funny, really, considering the bagging that isolated engine-room parts or functions seem to cop.

Ruckmen are just one example. Take Collingwood coach Mick Malthouse's still oft-quoted line about being better off with a cardboard cutout, after a game a few years back.

Or his own Josh Fraser's struggle for recognition in the role, the Magpies having preferred the less-talented pairing of Chris Bryan and Cameron Wood in last week's loss to Essendon.

Fraser was back in favour last night against Hawthorn, the Pies' duo having been taken apart by in-form Bomber David Hille, who played a critical role in the result.

Then there's the relationship between the ruckman, his on-ballers, and clearances. Sure, a win around the stoppages doesn't necessarily mean a win on the scoreboard, but it's a pretty handy start.

One popular school of thought says an advantage in the hitouts is a limited edge in that regard. There's some superficial evidence to back that up, Aaron Sandilands and Dean Cox leading the league for taps, their teams currently 14th and 15th, respectively.

Clearly, opposition on-ballers have been feeding frequently on the West Australian pair's ruckwork this year. But surely, a team is better served having possession delivered in a position it wants rather than where the other team planned it to go.

Which is what Essendon has been able to do with great effect these past couple of months, not only for the statistics charts, but the scoreboard as well.

Hille and the prolific Jobe Watson have combined for more centre clearances this season than any other pair in the competition, more than double the number for Geelong's Mark Blake with Cat pair Jimmy Bartel and Joel Corey, exactly double that of Hawthorn's Robert Campbell and Sam Mitchell.

And Essendon is making its wins at the stoppages count, second in the AFL for goals from clearances. If you think the Dons are scoring a lot of quick goals straight out of the middle, you're not mistaken, either, their ranking second again, Watson one of the best in the competition with 16, the Western Bulldogs' Adam Cooney the leader with 23.

The still unheralded Sam Lonergan is second for the Dons with 13, ruckman Hille third, and Leroy Jetta fifth, the gifted small man becoming an important forward-line figure with his tackling and defensive pressure.

The rankings for clearance wins at Essendon shows clearly the extent of the changing of the guard. Last year's top five were Watson, Damien Peverill, James Hird, Hille and Jason Laycock. In 2008, it's Watson, Hille, Lonergan, Mark McVeigh and Brent Stanton.

Not surprisingly, those five will all figure prominently in the Essendon best and fairest, along with Andrew Welsh, who has racked up the takeaway since his mid-season move to an on-ball role.

The midfield has been the cornerstone of Essendon's resurgence over the second half of the football year, its improved performance at the clearances crucial, and its senior ruckman Hille the single biggest influence on the team.

That Hille was able to produce another "blinder" last week against a team whose coach has continually thumbed his nose at the value of ruckwork would have given enormous satisfaction to rucking coaches and veterans of the role throughout the football world.

As would Watson's best-on-ground status to students of the stop-play in football. He was not only the game's leading possession winner with 41, but the leading clearance winner as well.

His side won the hitouts, the clearances, and consequently, won convincingly on the scoreboard. It's becoming a familiar story for Essendon. And you'll have trouble convincing the Bombers that those stats don't really matter.