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West Coast aren’t flat track bullies

19th May, 2016
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Nic Naitanui's back. (AAP Image/Tony McDonough)
Expert
19th May, 2016
27
2209 Reads

The West Coast Eagles are the only team in the AFL with a signature play. The play, the precision of it, says more about the Eagles than meets the eye.

You know the one I’m talking about. The Nic Natanui centre bounce hit out to a bullocking Luke Shuey, who delivers the ball to Josh Kennedy lace out on a lead. This one.

It is premium grade footballing joy in a jar. The Eagles run this play frequently, but without much predictability. It shows what can happen when three cogs are moving together with absolute precision. It’s dynamic, and hard to stop.

But it says more about the Eagles than how good they can be, or how good they are; it’s also a sign of their weakness.

There has been a lot of talk about West Coast’s record away from home over the past couple of weeks, and the dreaded ‘flat track bully’ tag has once again been sewn on to the back of their delicious royal blue and yellow jumpers. The Eagles have lost all three of their games away from the comfort of Subiaco Oval in 2016, taking their away record under Adam Simpson to 12 from 25, or 48 per cent.

It carries over to the team’s percentage: 207 at home compared to 59 away this year, and a more measured, but still skewed, 163 versus 105 in the team’s 52 home and away games with Simpson at the helm. Meanwhile the Eagles have won just two of 12 games away against top eight sides in the respective year of the game.

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So it follows that the Eagles are flat track bullies. But wait, how has the rest of the competition gone on those metrics over this time?

Percentage Percentage Win% Win% Top 8 Away Top 8 Away
Home Away Home Away Wins Losses
Adelaide 125.8% 104.7% 64.0% 46.2% 0 11
Brisbane Lions 77.4% 58.6% 26.9% 19.2% 0 14
Carlton 83.7% 71.4% 38.5% 19.2% 0 12
Collingwood 90.9% 107.2% 42.3% 50.0% 2 8
Essendon 88.8% 78.9% 44.0% 29.6% 2 11
Fremantle 131.4% 98.8% 76.0% 51.9% 5 11
Geelong 132.6% 98.1% 80.8% 56.0% 3 9
Gold Coast 97.2% 69.6% 46.2% 19.2% 1 11
Greater Western Sydney 106.3% 84.7% 57.7% 30.8% 0 10
Hawthorn 161.2% 124.1% 88.5% 61.5% 7 7
Melbourne 71.6% 85.5% 23.1% 34.6% 3 8
North Melbourne 116.6% 109.7% 73.1% 61.5% 2 4
Port Adelaide 135.2% 99.0% 69.2% 46.2% 3 9
Richmond 98.5% 115.0% 51.9% 60.0% 4 6
StKilda 74.7% 66.5% 19.2% 26.9% 2 11
Sydney 136.0% 137.2% 76.9% 73.1% 5 4
WCE 163.0% 105.6% 74.1% 48.0% 2 10
Western Bulldogs 116.1% 90.0% 57.7% 46.2% 3 8

How about that, hey? Almost every AFL team, and certainly teams from outside of Victoria, have a better record at home than they do away, have a better percentage at home than they do away, and have struggled to beat top eight teams away from home. The whole competition are a bunch of flat track bullies.

We can nit-pick these numbers – West Coast might be one of the biggest flat track bullies in the league, as evidenced by their percentage – but that debate has been done to death.

Instead, I want to change tack.

The Eagles might be flat track bullies, but they are most certainly front runners.

Under Adam Simpson’s reign, the Eagles have had one of the worst records for coming back from deficits. West Coast have found themselves trailing at three quarter time on 16 occasions since the start of the 2014 season, and have won just once. Their winning percentage of 6.3 per cent in those situations is 14th in the league, ahead of just Melbourne, Brisbane, St Kilda and Gold Coast, who have 15th, equal 17th, and 14th-ranked winning percentages over this stretch.

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When the Eagles are clicking, and get on top of their opponent, they are ruthless in their execution. But when the going gets a little tougher, and their opponent is able to wrest the momentum, West Coast find it hard to stay in the game. Most teams do, but for West Coast the impact is, according to the wins and losses on the board, more significant.

Does this suggest anything about their style of play? It is hard to say definitively from these numbers, but I think it does, particularly in attack. The Eagles employ one of the most threatening attacking sets in the league, but many players rely on the ball being delivered to advantage in order to score. Their two regular small forwards, Jamie Cripps and Josh Hill, are ranked 100th and 114th out of 122 for contested possession wins for players that have kicked at least a goal a game in 2016.

Outside of Andrew Gaff and Matt Priddis, who always get a lot of touches, many of the side’s midfield are prone to fading into states of ineffectiveness for stretches of games.

Down back, the man-zone defensive mechanism relies so heavily on the team having time to set up their grid. When the midfield isn’t winning the ball, that time is reduced and the Eagles are prone to conceding territory and scores. The stats on this exist, but are very hard to pull together for such a short piece so take my word for it as a sad person that watches every Eagles game (#freethestats).

But when it works, you get plays like the one above. And you get Josh Kennedy kicking five goals in a quarter, and coming close to breaking the all-time record for AFL ratings points earned in a single 20-minute period. And you get periods like half way through the third quarter against Geelong in Round 7, when the Eagles slammed on 32 points to nothing in eight minutes of game time.

In short, you get footballing joy.

There is nothing wrong with this prima facie, because as we saw last year West Coast’s best is good enough to carry them to the last game of the year.

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But this year, it all might not click in the same way that it did in 2015. Is it going to be enough to see them return to the pointy end of September? On the evidence we’ve seen over Simpson’s tenure, at this stage you would lean on the side of caution. As Geelong showed a couple of weeks ago, starve the Eagles of territory and possession and the curtains close. The recipe is there for everyone to see, and the best teams in the competition will cook with it.

That’s where the ‘flat track’ waters get a little muddy. Last year, the Eagles played three of the eventual bottom four away from home, as well as a cavalcade of middling teams interspersed with some bottom half of the eight sides. This year, they’ve played Hawthorn, Sydney and Geelong, and have the Dogs, Giants, and Crows to come – chalk meets cheese.

West Coast are almost certainly going to make it to September this year by virtue of their home ground advantage alone, where they’re likely to run the slate until a Round 22 match up against Hawthorn – who we’re assuming will be in boss mode by then.

They get a chance to get the ridiculous bully monkey off of their back against a depleted Port Adelaide this weekend. Ruckman Nic Naitanui is almost certainly going to rip the spine out of the poor sap who has been sacrificed by Port to play ruck as their stocks run dry. Port Adelaide’s smaller defensive set, which worked great until it didn’t over the weekend, should be no match for West Coast’s weaponry. An away win looks prospective.

But until the Eagles can prove they’re able to wrest back momentum, and win a game that isn’t being played on their terms, it’s hard to hold much confidence that a premiership win is imminent.

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