ESSENDON has kicked off its revised preparation for the home and away season with an intense 80-minute training session at Windy Hill on Sunday morning.

The Bombers have been forced to rework their plans four weeks before round one following the cancellation of their NAB Cup clash with St Kilda on Saturday night, after their two chartered planes could not land near Wangaratta.

Essendon football manager Paul Hamilton said the club had not run an inter-club practice game like the Saints did on Saturday night at the rural Victorian city, instead settling on a training session.

"It was a pretty intense session with game-like drills just to make sure we had a reasonable sort of hit-out," Hamilton told AFL.com.au.

"It wasn't a scratch game, but like a lot of our training it was game-related, which isn't anything particularly different to what we normally do."

Several Bombers who were not selected in the 27-man squad to take on the Saints joined in on Sunday's training, but it was mainly structured for the players who had missed vital match practice.

Hamilton said they got through training with no injury concerns.

"They were put through their paces a bit with some good, strong drills," he said.

Coach James Hird has stressed the importance of managing game loads throughout the pre-season competition, and missing last night's match has thrown out those plans.

Leading Bombers Jobe Watson, Michael Hurley, Brent Stanton, Dustin Fletcher and Dyson Heppell were all set to play their first game of the year against the Saints, and Hamilton suggested all players would need restructured programs to have them ready for Essendon's round one meeting with North Melbourne on March 31.

"The main thing is we've had to revise all our plans for individual players, and even our weekly training schedule because training this morning obviously wasn't on the agenda," he said.

"It's clearly not ideal for us, but having said that we've got enough time and games still ahead of us to engineer the desired work rate we need from the players in the lead up to round one."

That preparation will take shape on Friday night, with Essendon likely to choose close to a full-strength side to take on the Sydney Swans at Etihad Stadium.

"We want to get games into players so we're not going to have too many guys not playing. Anyone who can play will play this week," he said.

Callum Twomey covers Essendon news for AFL.com.au and essendonfc.com.au. Follow him on Twitter at @AFL_CalTwomey.

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