Wanganeen-Milera Does It Again, And I’m Just Grateful It’s Not Us
There’s a particular kind of dread that sets in when you watch a bloke like Nasiah Wanganeen-Milera go to work, and it’s the dread of an Essendon supporter doing quick maths on the draw. We don’t play St Kilda for a while. Small mercies. Because on the evidence of the last twelve months, this kid has gone from exciting prospect to the sort of player who makes grown men at the bar mutter “not again” into their beers.
A year on from the Melbourne demolition job
It was almost to the week twelve months ago that Wanganeen-Milera produced one of those final quarters that gets replayed on Fox Footy retrospectives for the next decade, tearing the Demons apart in a burst of coast-to-coast brilliance that had even rival fans standing up in their loungerooms. I remember watching it thinking, good god, imagine if that was pulled on us. Then I remembered it basically has been, in one form or another, every time the Saints have circled Marvel Stadium with us on the fixture.
This time around there was no last-gasp fireworks show against North Melbourne, no moment of chaos where he single-handedly rewrote the margin in four unbelievable minutes. Instead he just quietly, methodically, almost cruelly racked up 46 touches and four goals across a half of footy that most players would consider a career highlight if they managed it across an entire season. No fireworks needed. He just lopped forward, took the game by the throat, and strolled off with it under his arm.
Why this version might be scarier than the highlight-reel version
Here’s the thing that should worry every other list manager in the competition, ours included: last year’s effort against Melbourne was pure chaos-mode brilliance, the kind of freakish purple patch that makes for unbelievable television but that you can almost write off as one of those days where the footy gods decided to bless one bloke for twenty minutes. This one was different. He collected a truckload of the footy in the first half without exactly bossing the contest, then simply decided in the second half that enough was enough and turned the screws. That’s not a hot streak. That’s a bloke who has figured out he can control matches whenever the mood strikes him, and as an Essendon fan who has watched enough of our own midfielders get outmuscled in September to know the difference between a purple patch and genuine control, that distinction terrifies me.
North Melbourne, to their credit, wouldn’t have gone into that game with a plan to just let him roam. Nobody plans to get run over by a truck either. But that’s footy in 2026 apparently — some players are simply too dangerous to tag out of a game without conceding something dangerous elsewhere, and Wanganeen-Milera is fast becoming exhibit A in that argument.
The King injury taking the shine off a big win
Spare a thought for St Kilda fans too, because for all the euphoria of watching their bloke go bananas, the win came with the sourest of asterisks attached — a Max King injury that will have Saints supporters holding their breath until the scans come back. I know that feeling all too well. Every Essendon fan of the last decade has learned to watch our best forward line contests with one eye half-closed, waiting for the physio to jog out. It’s an awful habit to develop but once you’ve lived through enough of it, you start bracing for bad news the second a big man goes down awkwardly. Here’s hoping for St Kilda’s sake it’s nothing sinister, because a season-defining win losing its shine to an injury is about as footy as footy gets.
Meanwhile, back at Bomberland — Gunston doing his thing
While all this was going on down at Marvel, our own night out against the Bombers… sorry, I mean the game where we actually were the Bombers, saw Jack Gunston quietly outscore the entire forward line on the other side. Which, look, brings its own mixed emotions. On one hand, delighted the bloke’s still doing damage at both ends of a season most thought would be a gentle wind-down for him. On the other hand, this club has form for celebrating individual brilliance in matches we ultimately can’t hold onto, so I’m not throwing the confetti out just yet. We’ve been burned before. We’ve been burned by ourselves, mostly, which if you know anything about recent Essendon history is basically the house style.
Still, there’s something reassuring about watching a bloke in the back half of his career find another gear when the team needs it. It’s the kind of individual performance that reminds you footy isn’t always about the ladder position — sometimes it’s just about a fella doing his job better than everyone else on the ground for eighty minutes, and that’s worth acknowledging even in a season where the bigger picture for the Dons remains, let’s say, complicated.
What this all means heading into the run home
The broader point here, and the one that should have every coach in the competition scribbling notes, is that we are watching a genuine star emerge in real time and he’s doing it in a Saints jumper, which means eventually he’s going to line up against us in a game that actually matters. When that day comes, I fully expect our match committee to have some sort of plan, and I fully expect that plan to survive for about one quarter before Wanganeen-Milera decides he’s bored of it and does whatever he likes anyway. That’s not pessimism, that’s just pattern recognition from a man who’s watched this club try to tag, zone off, and otherwise contain generational talents for the better part of twenty years with wildly mixed results.
As someone who has become an accidental expert in things going sideways — ask me about the Tribunal sometime, I could probably represent myself at this point — I’ve learned to respect when a player is simply better than the containment strategy on offer. Wanganeen-Milera is rapidly becoming one of those blokes. A year ago it was a freakish final quarter against Melbourne. Now it’s a game-controlling half against North Melbourne that didn’t even need the fireworks to be devastating. The concering part for the rest of the competition isn’t what he did on Sunday. It’s imagining what version three looks like.
For now, Essendon fans can enjoy Gunston’s afternoon, keep half an eye on the King scans out of pure footy decency, and quietly file Wanganeen-Milera under “problems for future us.” There’s plenty of those already on the list. What’s one more.
