Today's ANZAC Day match taught us two things: Collingwood have few peers when it comes to murdering mediocre opposition; and if Essendon continue to serve up that sort of rubbish for the rest of the season, Matthew Knights' coaching career will be very shortlived.

The game was all but over at quarter time when the Magpies led 7.5 to 0.3, thanks to an on-song Travis Cloke, who kicked three, and a dominant midfield led by eventual Anzac Medallist Scott Pendlebury.

But it was the inept way the Bombers set up their attacking forays that caught the eye. It was truly painful to watch. An Essendon player with the ball across half back, or in the midfield, would invariable stop, prop and then handball sideways. Or backwards. Often to teammates standing still, and in no better position.

The players seemed captive to their instructions - handball at all costs - even when commonsense, and any natural instinct, would have told them to run and take the opposition on, or roost the ball long. Instinctive players such as Nathan Lovett-Murray and Paddy Ryder looked confused, torn between what they'd like to do and what they'd been told they had to do.

Collingwood understood this was the opposition's modus operandi and they came prepared. They converged in numbers on the ball-handler and shut down his options. A hurried Essendon handball would put a teammate under even more pressure and soon enough the ball would be coughed up and turned over.

After a quarter of this crablike progress, the Bomber fans - a feral lot at the best of times - could take no more. They let out loud Bronx cheers when one of their players chose to kick long. Usually it was Dustin Fletcher, who turns 35 in two weeks and is the oldest player in the team by six years, who provided that note of sanity to proceedings by spotting options upfield and pinpointing passes to them.

A recently retired Essendon player sitting among us in the stands was as confused as some of his former teammates. He wondered aloud: why not kick the ball to a 50-50 contest 55 metres away, rather than handball it sideways to what would eventually become a 50-50 contest? He was a forward in his playing days, admittedly, but said just by getting the ball into the forward line quickly, options open up, things happen, defenders get put under pressure and make mistakes. It's when the ball comes in at the speed of an arthritic tortoise that even the most modestly talented defenders start to look like a combination of Geoff Southby and David Dench.

Another instinctive Bombers player, captain Jobe Watson, who relies on a brilliant football brain rather than the KPIs which recruiting managers and the AIS are so enamoured of, seemed nonplussed, his thinking bogged down in treacle. Normally elusive, he was caught with the ball at least three times. It looked as though he, too, was wrestling with what the game plan dictated - and how he'd prefer to be playing.

Among the rabble, Fletcher, with his calmness and poise in possession, stood out as comfortably the Dons' best.

So much had changed since the last Anzac Day game. Then, David Zaharakis potted the winning goal for the Bombers with seconds remaining; today, he got one of his few touches early in the final quarter and managed to guide through a left-foot snap. That brought a wistful smile to the few remaining Dons fans who'd not joined the early exodus.

In the end, the Pies dished out a horrible mauling, 65 points at the final siren, but didn't really convince anyone they were anything other than what they've been for seven or eight years now - a good, competitive outfit but no great danger to the top two or three sides. The Bombers, however, were a revelation, for all the wrong reasons.