AFTER a game that could have been played for the Medicare Cup, so sharp was its focus on health, football has a new truism: a team with a crook coach will always beat a team with only one fit man on the bench.

Terry Wallace's week under the weather was the dominant player in pre-match dissection of his Tigers and Bombers, crowned yesterday morning by Coodabeen Greg Champion's ode Terry's Got The Lurgy (sung to the tune of Ferry Cross The Mersey). It seemed not so much a matter of Gerry and the Pacemakers, but whether Terry might need one.

But the man known as Plough ploughed on, recovering sufficiently from a respiratory infection to vacate his hospital bed on Friday and take his customary position in the Richmond coach's box at the MCG.

At quarter and three-quarter-time he bounded on to the field and addressed the troops as normal, with an understandable delegation of post-match media duties to assistant Brian Royal the only apparent departure from routine. As onballer Nathan Foley noted, the coach with the famously gravelled vocals was "full of voice".

Royal said Wallace had thanked the coaching group for their efforts "in a pretty tough week", one which highlighted the benefits of modern telecommunications. "The great thing about mobile phones is you can continue to keep in contact with people," he said.

"We spoke regularly to Terry, whether that be at home or from the hospital bed. Terry was doing a lot of work while he was away from the club." Foley said the coach was "usually in every day and floating around the club, but he steered clear early in the week and by the time he came back he wouldn't have been contagious". Royal, David King and Jade Rawlings ensured all continued to run smoothly.

Indeed, with his Tigers on top early it seemed Wallace's biggest challenge might be navigating the half-time journey from a vantage point on the northern side of the ground to the Richmond rooms under the southern stand. A golf buggy spared him an unwanted trot across the turf, picking him up from the lifts and ferrying him through the stadium's basement.

Upon returning to the box for the third quarter, a sickly feeling of sorts came back too as the Bombers kicked six unanswered goals. Not generally one to look pale, the coach must have felt decidedly queasy when Adam Pattison spoiled Kelvin Moore's attempt at mark of the year, and Henry Slattery screwed home the goal that put the Dons in front.

Six minutes later, Scott Lucas' volleyed goal of the year contender from deep in the forward pocket was, as the young folk might say, absolutely sick.

Had the Tigers, having been so in the pink, caught some kind of bug?

Matthew Lloyd put his team 11 points clear and temperatures continued to rise.

Enter Nathan Brown, a man whose health has been so closely monitored in recent years he might be a lab rat. His three last-quarter goals were a telling antidote to Essendon's heart.

By now, the crowded red-and-black sick bay had begun to tell, Andrew Welsh having staggered off in the first quarter, Angus Monfries limping stage left in the second, and Jay Neagle hobbling out of the game in the third. That they joined runner David Calthorpe was bordering on comical.

"I knew the day started to go pear-shaped when my runner, David Calthorpe, did a calf in the first 10 minutes," coach Matthew Knights lamented.

"It went downhill from there."

Yet there was reason to keep a little colour in the cheeks, Knights admitting: "They played better football in the second half with 19 than in first with 22."

Royal was generous in his praise of the vanquished — "to stay in the game was a credit to them" — while Foley said the contemporary volume and speed of rotations across every line meant Essendon's lack of numbers would have had "a huge impact".

A six-day turnaround after a trip to Perth that drained the whole group, not just the coach, meant the Tigers weren't exactly downhill skiing at the end either. The sight of Foley, hunched over and heaving for breath as he took a quick last-quarter break, illustrated their physical struggles.

But when the siren sounded, and three poorly Dons in tracksuit tops limped from the dugout to console their teammates, it was the Bombers who were spewing.