Adelaide will be a poor club if its players allow themselves to indulge in the same umpiring persecution complex that is afflicting many Crows supporters.

Coach Neil Craig said as much after his AFL side's five-point AFL win over Essendon at an AAMI Stadium that reverberated to some of the more concentrated abuse of the games officials ever seen at the ground.

Numerous spectators were ejected for the sheer intensity of their vitriol and the boos directed at umpires Scott McLaren, Matthew Nicholls and Simon Meredith at the games conclusion were as loud as the cheers for the home side's win.

The final free kick count was 20-18 in favour of Essendon and while it was fair to suggest the men in yellow missed quite a few incidents on both sides in slippery conditions, Craig advised his supporter base there was no point getting steamed up.

"Every now and again (umpires can have an influence) but that's okay," he said.

"Even if we'd lost, umpires didn't win the game or lose the game for us, we just talked about scoring shots we missed, so if were going to go down the track of the umpire causes us to win or lose, we're going to be a pretty poor club.

"Lets get our goal kicking organised before we start talking about umpires."

The wayward shooting Craig mentioned went close to sinking Adelaide for the second week in a row.

While there were countless other shortcomings last week when the Crows kicked 5.17 against West Coast, Friday night the stray radar turned a comfortable win into a fight to the finish.

"I think we had 10 more scoring shots than Essendon and probably half of those are shots we should've finished," Craig said.

"We want to talk about mental hardness and we want to be perceived as a mentally hard side and that's one area we need to get really strong on, because if you keep kicking like that it will cost you games and it will cost you in a game that is really important.

"(We didn't run the clock down) because we didn't have time to get it organised in the box we were just about to get into that mode."

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