“My view with Jake is this – sometimes you need to take a few steps back to straighten some things out, and you need to straighten out the fundamentals and again part of being an elite AFL athlete isn’t just training hard. I mean if you train really hard without the rest of your life being in order, you just burn out and get injured.

“And maybe that’s what Jake’s done in the past. Because, I can tell you, I watch him train and at times he trains extremely hard.

“But you have to get all of it right.”

Asked if Stringer had the right approach, Scott added: “Look, is Jake going to go from being where he is now to 10 out of 10, like absolute the most professional player in the competition? I think that’s an unrealistic expectation.

“But my job is to get the most out of every player on our list. And if we can move Jake, if we can just nudge him in the right direction and make him significantly better, but we’re not going to turn him into 10 out of 10.”

Stringer, 29, recruited from the Bulldogs in 2017, is out of contract at the end of this season, having signed a three-year deal with the Bombers in 2021.

Scott, who coached North Melbourne for almost a decade and extracted strong performances from veterans, said he had experience with 33-year-olds with “supposed deficiencies and issues.” They were “capable of incredible things if you provide the right supportive environment.

“You back them, and you take responsibility as a coach as well.

“If it was just up to Jake, we wouldn’t need coaches. It’s up to us to provide the right environment for him. So we’re all in this together, and it’s not going to be if Jake’s poor, it’s all Jake’s fault. I’ve got a big part to play in this … and it’s going to take some time.”

Since taking over as senior coach, Scott has emphasised Essendon’s need to improve standards of professionalism and for their players to live “elite AFL lifestyles”.

In a wide-ranging pre-season interview with this masthead, Scott broke down his plans for each of Essendon’s highly rated recruits and said their decisions to choose the Bombers reflected their faith in the list.

Read Jake Niall’s full interview with Brad Scott here.

“I’ve been clear with the players, this game and this lifestyle is not for everyone. What we expect young men aged 18 to 31 – normal 18- to 31-year-old men lead a very different lifestyle to these guys … if you’re thinking you’re missing out on stuff, you’re in the wrong game,” he said.

In a recent interview with former Essendon great Tim Watson for the club website, Stringer said he had recovered from September surgery on his foot and was in a strong position to tackle the season.

“I’m probably the best mentally I’ve been, and that’s probably helped me physically as well,” he told Watson. “In that sense I’d say it probably is the best pre-season I’ve had so far.”

“When I had my foot surgery I tried to figure out things in my life that I needed to figure out. There’s things I will continue to work on all the way through.

“It’s just about making sure you’ve got a healthy mind and a healthy body and it all grows through. I’ve had troubles throughout my whole career and there’s things I’m sure at a later date I will speak about it but at the minute I’m just in that building block process.

Loading

“I would say there is still another level for me to go in my footballing journey … I’m not saying my lifestyle was extravagant, I just didn’t know how to deal with things so I’ve just gone away and worked at those. It’s something I take day by day [to] become a better person, a better father, a better teammate, just an all-round better human, really.”

Keep up to date with the best AFL coverage in the country. Sign up for the Real Footy newsletter.