Essendon will continue playing their best possible side while endeavouring to develop young players in the second half of the season, says coach James Hird.

While minds may change should making the finals become mathematically impossible in the next few weeks, Hird said it was not fair to leave out players based simply on their age.

Having brought Shaun Edwards, Elliott Kavanagh and Nick O'Brien into the team in recent weeks, he said the team needed to guard against going into games with too much inexperience if it wanted to win.

"On the weekend we had eight guys under 50 games playing in the team and that's a high percentage of people under 50 games," Hird said. "I think history will tell you that if you play seven players or more under 50 games then your chances of winning are very low. You don't win many games and you're almost giving yourself no chance of winning with that many players under 50 games.

"We wouldn't want to have too many more. We might have to but I think it's a good balance, eight under 50 and 14 over 50, and some of those are between 50 and 100.

"It's a balance but we'll play the players in the best form and continue to strive to win games, but also develop our list."

Essendon are unlikely to regain Dustin Fletcher for this week's game against St Kilda — he has been home sick for five days — and Paul Chapman will miss another week with a groin strain.

David Myers may begin his return through the VFL side this week, while David Zaharakis and Heath Hocking are almost ready to come back into the AFL side.

The Bombers will need to reshape their forward line given Jake Carlisle has been ruled out for at least four weeks with an ankle injury.

"We've got some options. We've got [Michael] Hurley down back who might go forward. [Ariel] Steinberg has been elevated from the rookie list and has played forward and been down back," Hird said.

"Jobe [Watson] and Brendon [Goddard] might play forward, so we've got some options. It's just disappointing that we don't have Jake. I thought he was really starting to come into some form over the last couple of weeks."

Hird was keen to move on from the debate generated by Sam Mitchell's mock injection gesture during last weekend's game.

He said similar things had happened to his players before and that the episode could not be compared to when Essendon players wore tape around their arms in the 2001 grand final.

That gesture related to Brisbane's use of intravenous drips to hydrate their players during games earlier that season, a practice that was quickly banned by the AFL.

"We believe that our players just need to be able to move on and I don't think you can compare what happened to the Brisbane players to what's happened to our players in any way," Hird said.

"Our players have had to deal with this for three years and the Brisbane players - it was nothing really that could come close to the way our players have been treated by people within the industry."