ESSENDON has two games remaining before its round 12 bye, but midfielder David Zaharakis says the club is not getting carried away by the chance to set up its season before the break.
The Bombers' top-four prospects will jump if they can overcome Melbourne and the Sydney Swans in the next two weeks, but Zaharakis says they are just focusing on the Demons.
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"We've got two games left [until the bye] and hopefully we can get two wins from that and it [would] set up the year," Zaharakis said on Monday.
"But we've got Melbourne first and we can't take them lightly because yesterday they showed some signs over the first half against Carlton."
Zaharakis said the club was working to avoid a mid-year slump like last year, when it lost five games in a row. The best and fairest winner said the club's new fitness program was helping that cause.
"Over the last couple of years in that June and July period we've lost five or six games so hopefully this year the work of Dean Robinson in the weights room and our fitness can get us to not have that lull in the middle of the season," the 22-year-old said.
"Hopefully we can win the next two games and then really freshen up over the bye and have a good break, and then really have a driving point to the next point of the year."
While Zaharakis' brilliant form through the midfield has been important to Essendon's form, he is one of many young midfielders to step up this season.
He says at the start of the year the club identified that it wanted to have a bigger and stronger midfield group than any other team in the competition.
"At the start of the year we spoke about the depth and all the great sides over the last couple of years have had such depth, and we've probably only had Jobe [Watson] and Brent Stanton over the last couple of years," Zaharakis said.
"It's great that guys like Jake Melksham, Ben Howlett, now Travis Colyer are all coming into the midfield. We spoke about [how] we wanted to have the biggest depth in the AFL and we've got a long way to go, but we're getting a lot of improvement out of those guys."
Callum Twomey is a reporter for AFL Media. Follow him on Twitter @AFL_CalTwomey
