Essendon will unearth a 14th debutant this season, with Jayden Nguyen to play his first AFL game against Sydney this Saturday.<\/p>\n
The first player of Vietnamese descent in VFL-AFL history, the rookie from the Bombers\u2019 James Hird Academy and will live out his childhood dream after an impressive run of recent form in the Victorian Football League.<\/p>\n
Despite a setback at the halfway point of the year with a foot injury, the 177 centimetre defender has shown his potential in spades.<\/p>\n
With the announcement, Essendon now holds the AFL-era record (excluding expansion clubs) for debutants in a single season, besting Fitzroy\u2019s previous number of 13 back in 1991.<\/p>\n
Nguyen is grateful for his opportunity and hoping to continue inspiring his community along his AFL journey.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m just trying to take it all in. I\u2019d just woken up from a nap and I\u2019m like \u2018Scotty\u2019s calling me? What\u2019s up there?\u2019,\u201d he told the Essendon website.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe told me to keep my plans for this weekend free because they were about to get a fair bit better. It was the last thing I was expecting to hear, I\u2019m still in a bit of shock.<\/p>\n
\u201cI told the family as soon as I ran out of the room and my dad just started running around the house screaming. It was so bloody good.<\/p>\n
Nguyen was drafted out of the Calder Cannons and Aberfeldie. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Essendon will unearth a 14th debutant this season, with Jayden Nguyen to play his first AFL game against…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":35604,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[560],"tags":[638,64,63,55,639,85],"class_list":["post-35603","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-afl","tag-afl","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-australian-football-league","tag-australianfootballleague","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35603","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35603"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35603\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35604"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35603"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35603"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35603"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}