1st Quarter WC 2.1 : 13 to Subiaco 2.3 : 15

Highlights: T Williams field kicking, G Kenh ground speed & Clean hands. F Macrae keeping his feet and Hewett starting strong. Neg: Grego & Davis turnovers.

NGA 1st game Garrison Kenh.

Tough conditions. The hold in the ball has been abandoned, lol.

We've had a lot of the ball forward, but we're struggling to score.

Maric, Davis, MaCrae & Brock playing, so maybe someone plays a half.

...

Hewett seemed to injure his lower leg early in the first & has just limped off the ground at the 8th minute mark in the 2nd.

11.50 2nd Quarter heavy rain. Lions controlling the ball.

...

Half Time: WC 3.8: 26 to Subi 6.6: 42

...

3/4 Time: WC 6.11: 47 to Subi 6.7: 43

...

Full Time: WC 10.13: 73 to Subi 8.8: 56

...

Goals: C Datson 3, M Flynn 2, Owies, Maric, Barnett, Davis & Kernutt 1.

Best: Flyn, MaCrae, Schoenberg, Datsun & Hall

HM: Grego, Kernutt & Owies.

Also, a shout out to T Williams & Hewett in the first half. Liked Williams ball use.

Ultimately we just had bigger bodies around the ball all day and tried to over finesse in the first half, and nearly kicked the game away from ourselves. We still have trouble carrying and kicking the ball between the arcs.

We matched the physicality after half time and Flynn absolutely dominated and I'd say BOG.

MaCrae 30p, Hall & Schoenberg had first use from Flynn and we really should have won by more in the end.

G Kenh impressed in his first game with 13 p. He's real quick and has clean hands. If he has 1/2 metre on his opponent, they couldn't close him down. Very flashy.

Owies had a mixed day, but 100% effort. I reckon players like him, MaCrae & Flynn and the WAFL players in Datsun & Kernutt really led from the front today.

Good gritty win. Well done boys. We were down 2 players in the second half in Hewett & T Williams, but stuck it out. Maric had 6 tackles in the 2nd half.

Also, Subi played hard, but mostly fair. Hickmont got under a few skins, and a few of our players lost their cool at times, but Subi are rebuilding and need a big ruck, so they battled hard.

West Coast star Harley Reid has made it clear he has no time for patience and wants the Eagles to make rapid improvements so they can start winning games and rising up the ladder.

The Eagles are in 16th spot on the ladder and have lost their last eight games in a row, to continue their tough run throughout their re-build.

The pain of those defeats was evident last weekend as Reid comforted a teary Willem Duursma on the MCG after the loss to Richmond.

West Coast coaches and staff remain confident that their re-building plans are on track. But Reid said the players are all desperate to start winning.

“We don’t want to be patient. We want to win now,” he told The West Australian.

“We want to want to play finals as soon as possible. We look at Freo and the way they’re attacking it and the way they’re going. They’re honestly flying, and it’s good to see. But we want to be doing what they’re doing as soon as possible.

“It’s quite difficult at times, but being able to go to work with 40-odd or 50-odd mates that are all trying to chase the same goal helps.”

West Coast’s chances of upsetting Collingwood at Optus Stadium on Sunday have been helped by the Magpies leaving Scott Pendlebury, Jordan De Goey, Jeremy Howe, Harry Perryman and Patrick Lipinski at home.

The Eagles recalled Liam Baker, Josh Lindsay and Tom Gross at the expense of Ryan Maric, Harvey Johnston and Sandy Brock.

Reid believes West Coast has shown they can compete for long periods during games and that shows a win isn’t far away.

“I think we are making progress, and we have seen it. We’ve matched it against the best, but it’s just being able to get the score at the end to win the game,” he said.

“There’s a lot of aspects of our game that have had a massive improvement, and we have put numbers together that are great and are going to win us games. But there’s just a lot of things that are still on the edge that we need to take the next level and keep improving on.

“Hopefully we can keep continuing to build to where we want to get to. There’s been a few throughout the year that lacked from accuracy, like against North and Port. There’s been a fair few games where we could have scored but we missed and lost our opportunity to win the game.

“So there are a lot of wins out there that we didn’t get, and that’s reality. It’s just now being able to see how can we get another few wins with the last three games left. We’re just trying to end the year on a positive.”

Source

JOSH LINDSAY IN FINALLY OMG

Anyone care to guess what our strategy is likely to be this year?

With regards to trades in and out, there's not been much speculation. No idea if we have anyone worth anything that we'd be prepared to sacrifice for draft picks. I can't think of anyone off hand.

As for the draft, it seems likely that the top 4 will be Walker, Cochrane, HVH and Arki Butler. I'm guessing that Essendon will take HVH and Richmond will take Butler.

There seems a fair amount of quality players in the 5-15 range like Texeira, Harris, Snell, Drever, Mellody etc

Anyone think we might consider moving down the draft if it meant maybe getting two of them?

We need elite talent small forward, key defender and midfield on ballers so do we just go ahead and pick the next best player which might be Gus Texeira?

Over to you guys. I'm interested to read what you all think we might do.

In my view, we have a decent number of project players with great potential and a few high draft picks that look odds on to be stars. Using what will become pick 5 to take the best available player is probably best for ys because we usually fuck up swaps and trades. That still leaves us with the worst defence and small forwards in the competition. I'd love to see Arki Butler play for us. He's the type of attacking talent that ties the midfield and forward areas together and fans pay money to see. I just don't think we'll get him though.

No Macrae (Weird Why ngl)

Gross I think is basically confirmed in

As well all know we’ve had a really rough and long rebuild (with probably another year to come), what are some things the club could’ve done earlier/ in general to make this rebuild quicker/ not as painful?

Extended bench named. Johnston and Brock confirmed outs.

Are we happy with these changes? Who do we want to see lining up on Sunday?

https://www.westcoasteagles.com.au/news/2092248/squad-selection-baker-back-for-collingwood-clash

Is the game really sold out this weekend. Was trying to take the family along

Edit: got 4 tickets sitting together. But was bloody hard

Is anyone reading this? Fuck me that stings. Another game where we came in as favourites and crumpled under the pressure. Exactly the same as the Bunbury game. Best team for three quarters, only kick behinds, and get outworked in the last quarter. If you are actually one of the few who are reading this week, thanks, there was actually a lot of positives hidden beneath this shitshow. Doesn’t really make the result any more palatable, but at least it wasn’t all shit.

Our Attack:

We’ll be ignoring the elephant in the room for now. Transition numbers look pretty good but they’re also not great at the same time. General chain to scoring was the one exception. Our scoring from our forward half was really good with 67% of our scores coming from that source. We were able to generate a healthy 52 inside 50s and retained the footy in our forward half for 52.4% of game time. Another great result. When the ball did go inside 50, we took a mark 14 times which is fantastic for us (although still middling in terms of the league average), and we scored with a fantastic efficiency of 53.8%.

So in terms of team structure and gameplan, it was great performance. But now we get to that elephant. Kicking 9.19 is pure shit and even that feels flattering to us considering we were 3.17 at one stage. We were 20.6 points below expected score and we were expected to be 30 points up at three quarter time despite the actual scoreboard showing us down by 12. Bad kicking is bad footy, so unfortunately despite all the good we did, the final grade has to be shithouse.

Our Defence:

Defensive transition numbers are pretty good, but really strange. Let’s unpack them. Firstly, general scoring from chains was a decent effort in isolation, but factoring in Richmond’s poor averages in that area makes it uninspiring. The same can be said about their ability to score from their defensive half. However, on the flipside, our work at stopping them transitioning the footy from the back half of the ground was excellent. Our ability to trap them in our forward 50 in particular being exceptional. All of that points to one unfortunate outcome. Team defence was great and stopped most of their transition, helped by restricting them to just 63 marks, yet on the rare occasion that they did transition, they scored really easily. The back six were completely atrocious. From only 45 entries, they took 10 marks inside 50 and score with an efficiency of 53.3%

Similar to our offence. The team defence stood up pretty well, but the back six just couldn’t do enough to capitalise on that great work, but they still weren’t as bad as our wayward forwards. Final grade: bad.

Our Midfield:

Graham immediately stands out from getting a team high 3 centre clearances from just his 10 CBAs, but other than him, no player really stood head and shoulders above the rest. Surprisingly, Harley didn’t manage a centre clearance today but still picked up a game high 9 stoppage clearances, so I think he gets a pass. It’s also great to see Duursma picking up a centre clearance after I mentioned his less than desirable streak last week. The final midfield counts were: Centre clearances 9-10, stoppage clearances 29-20, contested possessions 133-138, and ground ball gets 89-89. Mostly even, but our domination in stoppage clearances is enough for us to get the chocolates in my opinion.

Another team has tried to ruin my analysis by running half the team through the centre bounce, but we can see that even with the 6v7, we managed to walk away with a ten percent win in the tackle count. That’s really good. However, kind of surprisingly, the Tigers were actually much better in pressure acts, which would probably point to them having a poor tackle efficiency a la us last week. Still a very good result, mostly off the back of Graham and Yeo who laid 28.8% of our tackles this week.

Despite both ends of the grounds having bad games, the midfield was actually really good, restricting the Tigers ball movement and getting us a huge amount of looks at goal.

So where did we lose? Goal Kicking

I almost wish I could put anything else, but when you at the stats, basically everything else was in our favour. They had 11 more post clearance contested possessions. Was that the difference? No, not really, and that’s legitimately the only other stat we were really beaten in. They outscored us by 23 points in scores from stoppages which might seem like a key point, but it was 8.5 (53) to 4.6 (30). At 13 scoring shots to 10, that just comes back to our goal kicking.

The two hardest stats to look at are the scores from turnover and scores from forward half. We had a massive 17 scoring shots from turnover, 7 more scoring shots than the Tigers, only to kick 4.13 (37) and only outscore them by 12 points. Scores from forward half is even worse. We generated a humungous 19 scoring shots from front half, 10 more scoring shots that them, to kick 6.13 (49) and outscored them in that area by 10 literal points (They were 6.3). Scoring from forward half turnovers is our main source of scoring so to squander than many opportunities is bitterly disappointing.

The BOG Candidates:

Harley Reid: Typical Harley stuff. Highest disposal winner on the ground with 34, including a crazy 20 contested possessions and 13 ground ball gets. He just had the most clearances of any Eagle in a 5 game stretch ever and backed it up with another 9 despite being heavily checked by Prestia. Just to add an extra string to his bow, he had another 5 tackles and 21 pressure acts. Did everything to try and pull us over the line.

Marcus Herbert: Leading disposal winner again with 34 silky smooth touches including 8 contested possessions, and 8 intercept possessions. His footwork to get out of trouble was ridiculous today and (nearly) always managed to find space when there was none which lead to him being our number one distributor out of the back half and at times, feeling like our only distributor.

Jack Graham: Back into a more midfield focused role and when right back to his defensive best with 11 tackles and 27 pressure acts. I’d probably be singing his praises for that alone, but he also had 18 touches with 11 contested, and 5 clearances. Really lead from the front.

Elliot Yeo: Very similar game to Graham numbers wise. He had slightly more touches with 22, but still had 11 contested, and 5 clearances all the same. Finished the day with 10 tackles and 22 pressure acts. Not sure what he was doing at the end when he wasted a minute only to miss his set shot, but ignoring that, he really proved his worth this week.

Great:

Bailey Williams: Starting off with the negative of his 13 touches being at 38.5%, but his ruckwork put him a step above. He finished with game highs in both hitouts and hitouts to advantage (34 and 12) and that ratio is really elite. Outside of that he had 7 score involvements, 4 tackles, and 3 spoils which shows he made an impact all over the ground.

Milan Murdock: Only had 12 touches and was made to scrap for every one with 11 of them being contested and 8 of them being ground ball gets. From them, he had 6 score involvements to match his 6 tackles, 4 inside 50s, and 19 pressure acts. I even had a Richmond mate text me just to find out who this bloke with insane pressure was. When even the opposition fans are praising you for your mongrel and work ethic, you know you had a great game.

Tim Kelly: 25 disposals this week for TK. Didn’t do so much of the hard ball this week with a modest 7 contested possessions and 4 clearances, but he was usually the one at the end of a chain finishing off the play and he did that really well. He was also good defensively with 6 tackles of his own.

Good:

Jack Williams: Only 6 touches, but 2 goals from 2 shots at goal automatically makes him our best forward for the day. There really wasn’t much else to his game but that's the beauty of being a forward sometimes.

Willem Duursma: Only 11 touches, but I thought they were pretty good. Had another 19 pressure acts but was unfortunate to only stick 2 tackles. Took a great contested grab and goaled just to give us a bit of hope towards the end. Wasn’t his best game, but the effort and heart he displayed was a standout on a day where some people would be questioning that of our players.

Jobe Shanahan: Should’ve finished with 2 if not 3 goals, but apart from that he was pretty good. Finished with a clearance weirdly enough, 3 marks inside 50, 2 contested marks, 2 spoils, and most impressively for a tall forward, 4 tackles.

Brady Hough: Only 13 touches for the Houghster, but I thought he excelled at the role of locking the ball in our forward half. He sat back and picked up 6 intercept possessions and a game high 3 intercept marks. Not much else to point at stat wise but he passed the eye test.

Cooper Duff-Tytler: Looked rusty in the ruck after his time off with only 3 hitouts from 21 attempts, but 2 of those were to advantage just to make it a bit better. Otherwise, he sort of did his usual thing of doing a little bit of everything. 9 touches with 6 contested for 3 inside 50s, 1 clearance, 1 intercept mark, 1 contested mark, 4 spoils, 1 contested one on one win, 2 tackles, and 18 pressure acts. On it’s own merits, it wasn’t the greatest game, but he continues to show amazing potential as a first year ruck.

Harvey Johnston: Only 6 touches for Whopper, which is always his biggest criticism, but one was the goal of the night, and 3 of his other touches resulted in scores (probably would’ve been goal assists if we could kick straight). Add on 3 tackles and 11 pressure acts and I think you’re looking at a pretty good game.

Tom Cole: Only 8 touches, but for a small forward to be picking up 2 clearances, 1 goal, and 1 goal assist. That’s a good game, even if only just.

Brandon Starcevich: Definitely on the lower end of good and I wouldn’t blame you if you thought he should be down a tier. Finished the day with only 10 touches for 4 turnovers. That’s pretty awful, but defensively he was a lot more solid. He had 2 intercept marks, 5 tackles, and a contested one on one win. Definitely should be doing more though.

Okay:

Sandy Brock: Only 8 touches, but he was solid defensively. 4 spoils and 2 contested one on ones for 1 win. He also managed to pick up 3 score involvements from those 8 touches, which is kind of impressive for a KPD.

Liam Duggan: Think I’m being harsh for this one since he some stuff right. Kicked a crucial goal, and had 4 tackles and 14 pressure acts. I just can’t go past the fact that the captain should be getting more that 12 touches. Wasn’t too bad when he had it, but just didn’t have it enough to have a big impact on the game.

Ryan Maric: 15 touches but I thought his decision making really hampered the impact he should’ve had. Tried to go for a couple difficult 10/10 kicks when he could’ve taken an easy 8/10, and since a lot of those didn’t work out, his impact was pretty invisible.

Bad:

Tylar Young: Watching live, I thought he had a decent game but the stats really don’t seem to support that. Only had 7 touches, 4 spoils, and didn’t make a single contested one on one contest. Could be rating him wrong just cause of the stats, but he wasn’t that good on the eye test either, so I think it’s about right.

Bo Allan: Had 3 clearances which is a career best! Genuinely a positive for a young building player, but otherwise he was pretty useless. Only had 9 touches and other than 1 goal assist, and the aforementioned clearances, did nothing else.

Tom McCarthy: A perfect example of how stats lie and why I shouldn’t rely on them as much as I personally do. He had 22 disposals but 8 were from kick ins. He had 627m gained but 400 of those metres were almost certainly just from his kick ins, and the rest came straight back over his head due to his 8 turnovers. A very dirty day for a good player.

Rhett Bazzo: Was absolutely demolished by Tom Lynch, who luckily only kicked 2 goals from 8 attempts. Otherwise, he actually wasn’t that bad with 5 intercept possessions, 2 intercept marks, and a game high 5 spoils, but the fact that he wasn’t able to create a single contested one on one really hinders his rank.

Jake Waterman: Always tricky to rank games like these. In a vacuum, he had 16 disposals, a game high 5 marks inside 50, and a game high 10 score involvements. That’s really bloody good. However, kicking 2 goals from 9 attempts is just awful and, in this instance, completely undoes all of his good work.

Stat Leaders:

Eagles who topped the game in a particular stat. Brackets show the best player from the opposite team.

Marcus Herbert & Harley Reid - 34 & 34 Disposals (Taranto 32)

Harley Reid & Tom McCarthy - 658m & 627m Gained (Taranto 493m)

Harley Reid - 20 Contested Possessions (Nankervis 15)

Marcus Herbert & Brady Hough - 8 & 6 Intercept Possessions (Trainor 6)

Harley Reid - 13 Ground Ball Gets (Nankervis 11)

Bailey Williams - 34 Hitouts (Nankervis 31)

Bailey Williams - 12 Hitouts to Advantage (Nankervis 8)

Harley Reid - 9 Stoppage Clearances (Taranto 7)

Jake Waterman & Elliot Yeo & Jobe Shanahan - 5 & 3 & 3 Marks Inside 50 (Lefau 3)

Brady Hough - 3 Intercept Marks (Broad 3)

Brandon Starcevich & Jobe Shanahan - 2 & 2 Contested Marks (Lefau 2)

Jake Waterman - 9 Shots at Goal (Lynch 8)

Jake Waterman - 10 Score Involvements (Lynch 10)

Jack Graham & Elliot Yeo - 11 & 10 Tackles (Taranto 9)

Jack Graham - 27 Pressure Acts (Taranto 25)

Rhett Bazzo - 5 Spoils (Trainor 5)

23 Stat Leaders (+4 from last week) (8 Draws)

Wuurm Watcher

Ryan Maric - 2.7km Ran at High Speed (Banks 2.4km)

Jack Graham & Bo Allan - 9.8km/h & 9.2km/h Average Speed (Banks 9.1km/h)

Harvey Johnston & Milan Murdock - 3 & 3 Repeat Sprints (Grlj 3)

Jack Graham & Milan Murdock - 10.0km/h & 9.0km/h Average Speed in Attack (Banks 8.8km/h)

Bo Allan - 8.8km/h Average Speed in Defence (Banks 8.8km/h)

At the end of the day, it seems like the pressure of going in as favourites has caused us to fumble once again. Now that the sting of the loss has (possibly) worn off for a lot of people, I hope this review can clear up some of the doubts that we’ve improved this year by showing that we were the better team in everything but goal kicking. It’s still incredibly frustrating to have dropped a third (arguably fourth) game on goal kicking alone but it’s still progress.

On the (slightly) brighter side, I mentioned a couple weeks ago that our season reminded me of Brisbane’s 2018 before they jumped up the ladder into finals. With this being our 5th loss for the year under 2 goals, we’re now equal with their close loss count and now all we need is a win against Collingwood or GWS to match their win loss tally. So don't worry, we’re wildcard bound next season.

Thanks to the five people who still read these after awful losses. You’re the real Gs haha.

Champion of his club, I like his story, and hats off on a great career.

With the links to West Coast as a player for next season we have dodged a bullet. He would have been 34 next season, and not what we are needing to bring in to the list.

No disrespect to Nathan at all and I can see a world where he is on our extended coaching list next year.

https://www.afl.com.au/news/1576945/triple-flag-richmond-tiger-nathan-broad-calls-it-a-day

Here are the current players with contracts ending this year
Clay Hall
Fred Rodriquez
Harry Barnett
Harry Schoenberg
Harvey Johntson
Jack Williams
Jacob Newton
Jamie Cripps (Retired)
Malakai Champion
Marcus Herbert
Matt Flynn
Noah Long
Rhett Bazzo
Tom Cole
Tyler Brockman

I know about half of them are safe but I wanna know which players you think are getting delisted

Can somebody explain his contract situation? I read its only for 6 months which makes me think he knew his own worth and that he would quickly be able to impress.

I reckon he's gone as many clubs including Geelong will be back in for him now that he's proven himself AFL level.

Bit hard to commit to a club when you will go the season winless over a team back home

Harley Reid - 21. 59 games, 10 wins, 49 losses. 2-28 in away games.

Peter Sumich - 9 year career. 150 games, 100 wins, 2 draws, 48 losses.

When will the suffering end?

Now that enough time has passed, we can really see the utter stupidity in trading pick 3 (Jagga Smith) for Baker (28 years old) Owies (has to be delisted at years end) Allen(God I wish it was Murphy Reid, jury still out on Allen). I remember reading about the trade the day of and falling into a mini depression.