With the first pair of episodes and my opening review now in our rearview mirror, instalments 3 and 4 of 'The Bombers: Stories of a Great Club' saw the clock hands shift forward through the 60s, 70s, and early 80s.
While the heroic deeds of shooting stars like Geoff Blethyn and Graham Moss were covered brilliantly on the Fox Sports documentary series, this period also represented a genuine lull for the league's equal most successful club.
But fear not Bomber fans, as a man named Sheedy was along to right the ship very shortly afterward.
As someone that has begun dedicating an hour each Tuesday to watching this stirring series, I was again left pondering by the time the screen faded to black.
So, before the next set of chapters are read out on Melbourne Cup Day, I sought to find answers to another series of queries that have sat on my mind.
Was Geoff Blethyn the greatest footballer to wear glasses?
Ask any Essendon fan with grey hair to describe Geoff Blethyn, and you’re sure to hear an array of adjectives.
While gifted, precise, and athletic are likely to be mentioned throughout their assessments, the descriptor of bespectacled is a certainty to be raised.
Although the Strathmore schoolboy’s first steps between the classroom and the goal square came without his now-iconic Buddy Holly-styled frames, the peak of Blethyn’s days inside a sashed guernsey came when his troublesome contact lenses were finally traded out.
As the only AFL/VFL player to have ever topped the tonne with the aid of prescription glasses, Blethyn is, without doubt, the greatest name to have ever played top-flight football while looking like a cast member of ‘Revenge of the Nerds’.
Still, just who did the now 70-year-old beat out to claim this honour?
Given I’ve never seen a player at any level wear glasses on game day, I’ve had to hit the history books to find out, and according to my shotgun studies, Blethyn had only two known competitors.
With 13 games and 11 goals for Carlton in 1977, Tony Southcombe made an instant impact in his singular season at Princes Park. Yet by the completion of a year that saw the Blues miss the five by less than a win, the country champion called it quits and headed back to Bendigo.
Having sustained a pair of injuries from both a football and a cricketing four-piece, St Kilda’s Chris Stone decided for an unconventional antidote in a pair of modified squash goggles
Despite his career spanning just four seasons between 1987 and 1981, the rover turned businessman went on to marry the former Prime Minister of Belgium, putting paid to the theory that sports and politics should never mix.
