Collingwood president Eddie McGuire believes St Kilda would be "filthy" that many of Essendon's best players are taking part in a match practice session against VFL team Williamstown on Friday night rather than facing the Saints on Saturday in the NAB Challenge.
Radio station 3AW revealed that Essendon have invited Williamstown to their Tullamarine base on Friday night for a joint training session that would involve "match simulation". The session has been reportedly been approved by the AFL.
The 25 players still at Essendon who were on the club's list in 2012 are sitting out the AFL's pre-season circuit to protect the anonymity of the provisionally-suspended players among them who were caught up in the supplement scandal.
Essendon have stressed that the session would not serve as a practice match – if it did, the Bombers would risk having the backdated period for potential suspensions to its players - from the anti-doping tribunal - begin on Friday night rather than September 2014.
"The Bombers have got to have a hit-out as well, they're being snookered because they're waiting to see what the (tribunal) result is and, like everyone, we'd like to actually know what the result is and then you can cut your cloth accordingly," McGuire told Triple M radio on Thursday.
"But you'd be filthy if you were St Kilda if they [Essendon] were playing blokes on the Friday night that should be playing on the Saturday."
The Essendon-Williamstown training session is scheduled to start at 5:30pm on Friday.
The unavailability of so many top-liners has led to a total of 13 top-up players being drafted into a drastically weakened Essendon team which McGuire dubbed "Dad's Army".
St Kilda veteran Leigh Montagna said it wasn't ideal for his team to be playing against lower-grade opposition.
"Obviously as a playing group you'd love to play against a strong opposition, but obviously we understand the circumstances," Montagna told Triple M.
"But really at this time of year, we're just looking to worry about our own football, we just want to play good, solid football ourselves and work on our own game plan.
"So it doesn't really matter the opposition, but ideally you'd like to play a strong team."
