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For a team which sits just one win behind the ladder leaders with a 15-6 win-loss record, West Coast have copped an exorbitant amount of flak this season.
Pundits and fans have lined up for months now to lay in the slipper, most commonly branding the Eagles flat track bullies.
Yet, from the perspective of a West Coast fan, I would say the Eagles sit roughly where they should at sixth on the ladder.
They are not an elite team, rather an above average unit who had a great run in many different ways last year, and made a shock grand final appearance after finishing ninth in 2014.
In 2015 they had great luck with injuries, their defensive zoning tactics caught teams off guard, and their best players hit form at the right times. When things fall into place like this, teams can achieve beyond what their collective talents would suggest is possible.
Heading into 2015, no one bar one-eyed West Coast fans had tipped them as genuine premiership threats. Skip forward by 12 months and they were probably the side most commonly predicted to win the 2016 flag.
As the season unfolded, and it became clear they weren’t premiership material, West Coast were inundated with criticism. At times they have been held to account as savagely as if they were a side which had clearly the best list in the competition and had underperformed drastically.
Meanwhile, the reality is that, even at full strength, the Eagles are not as well equipped as the leading sides.
They don’t have the endless midfield options of Sydney, the vast finals success and genius coaching of Hawthorn, the unstoppable offence of Adelaide, or the astounding depth of talent of GWS.
West Coast are a good team. But they’re far from a great one, and the same was true last season, which was brutally exposed in the grand final when Hawthorn destroyed them.
Much has been made of the Eagles poor 3-5 record against the other top eight teams this season. Their losses came against Hawthorn at the MCG, Sydney at the SCG, Geelong at Skilled Stadium, the Bulldogs at Etihad, and Adelaide at Subiaco.
If you tipped the Eagles to go even close to a win in those first three fixtures you were delusional. The fourth of those losses was a nailbiter against the Bulldogs. The only unexpected result was the loss at home to Adelaide.
What each of those matches showed, apart from the Bulldogs fixture, was that West Coast simply weren’t up to the standard of the elite teams.
Their midfield, in particular, was exposed as being very shallow and far too reliant on ruckman Nic Naitanui and Brownlow medallist Matt Priddis to do the heavy labour.
By a third of the way through the season I had come to terms with the fact that, barring some significant luck, West Coast were not going to contend for the flag. They were a fifth to eighth side who had overperformed last year on the back of a generous fixture and other pieces of fortune. Their most recent luck was bad, with the loss of Naitanui to a knee injury.
This readjustment of expectations has not been made by many pundits and fans. Rather than recognising they had overrated the Eagles list, they’ve been preoccupied with slamming West Coast for not living up to their inflated expectations.
West Coast will not have a significant impact in September. This much has been obvious for three months now. Their list is just not that good. Sixth place is about right.