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Earlier this week, the Essendon Football Club unveiled their five-year blueprint to deliver a breakthrough premiership and boost membership to 125,000. They outlined their five strategic pillars starting with premierships and then focusing their attention on such concepts as “people, heartland, national footprint and commercial strength”. But had the framers of this plan — and there’s nothing novel about it because we’ve heard it all before from a number of clubs including our own — attended last night’s Keith 'Bluey' Truscott Memorial Trophy presentation, they might have realised that premierships don’t simply materialize out of thin air or merely through the introduction into a club of bells and whistles. The common thread of nearly everything that was said throughout the evening, from President Kate Roffey, to Hall of Fame inductee Neale Daniher, to retiring heroes Neville Jetta and Nathan Jones, to coach Simon Goodwin, skipper Max Gawn and the award winning players and all of it was spontaneous, not contrived, was that it’s not just about winning premierships or acquiring 125,000 members. It’s about bringing the right people together to the club through a lot of hard effort and once you do that, then the final by product might bring you a premiership. It’s all about developing a culture first.