Essendon remain hopeful that Mark McVeigh's ankle injury will not cause too much disruption to his AFL pre-season.

McVeigh's body language was not good when he limped from the field during the second term on Friday night, during the narrow NAB Cup win over Brisbane at Telstra Dome.

He finished the game wearing a protective boot on his left foot.

The Bombers will wait for swelling to go down before McVeigh undergoes medical scans on Monday.

Immediately after the game, Essendon's medical staff were optimistic that the latest injury setback for McVeigh was not serious.

McVeigh is one of Essendon's most important players, but hamstring and knee injuries restricted him to 14 games last season.

He also suffered a broken toe late last year.

After the win over the Lions, coach Matthew Knights said McVeigh's obvious frustration at the latest injury underscored his enthusiasm for the Bombers.

"Mark's very passionate about the club and his football, so he gets very disappointed if he can't train or play matches," Knights said.

"It's probably more Mark's disappointment in potentially not being able to play next week."

While the Bombers are now through to Friday night's NAB Cup semi-final against Collingwood, Knights said it was concerning that they had again failed to kick away from an opponent.

Essendon twice led Brisbane by 19 points in the second half, before scraping home by two points.

They were also well-placed in round one against the Western Bulldogs, but had to work frantically in the end for the one-point win.

"It's good to win those games, but we can still play better in the last half of the last quarter," Knights said.

"What we spoke about after the game is that two or three times we got out to (19 points) and then we just let some easy `outs' happened.

"We just let Brisbane back into the game quickly, rather than maybe pushing it out to a five or six-goal margin.

"We've got to be better than that ... the good sides are really ruthless when they get on top of you."

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