West Coast is flying high once again, but the test begins now

We break from this week’s crisis-mongering to bring you some important news: West Coast is good, can get better and are showing the league there is no one way to win a game of football.

I hate to say I told you so, but: I told you so.

A handful of aesthetically unpleasing football games have stirred up a hornets nest worth of hot takes. We need zones. We need 16 a side. We need two footballs. Okay, that last one was made up, but I’m sure someone somewhere thought about it.

Hint: Alastair Clarkson, the smartest football mind in the room, has given us the first step if something must be done. It is time to pay more free kicks, particularly once the play breaks down and players begin converging on the ball. Pay free kicks that are there now but don’t get paid for whatever reason: incorrect disposal, dropping the ball, tackling a player without the ball, legal high contact.

It was tempting to toss aside real football talk for another week, but there is so much hot air around at the moment – and none of it coming from the folk who regulate the competition – that it seems mostly like yelling at clouds. They’ll get themselves in a huff, say their piece and we’ll move on because the games will start.

Instead let’s talk about the team who has exhibited the most surprising upside in 2018: the West Coast Eagles. In the preseason they were the west coast wildcards; would they improve, stagnate or go backwards? It was impossible to predict because so much was up in the air both on and off the field.

After six rounds we know the answer. The Eagles are almost certain to play finals football for the fourth straight season and sixth season in eight after completely revolutionising their on-field personnel in the offseason. Their method in attack has been tweaked, and the defence looks as stout as it did in the club’s run to the 2015 grand final on account of the improvement up the field.

We cannot throw the club into the premiership fires just yet, because for all of the improvement the Eagles haven’t really been tested beyond their new fortress. And through the vagaries of the fixture they will remain so for some time yet.

But we need to talk about West Coast, and not just because they are second on the ladder having won their past five games, but alos because they offer a glimpse of where football may be going.

Jeremy McGovern (Paul Kane/Getty Images)

Invigoration, and improvement
Ask someone to pick two words to describe West Coast at the end of last year and you will receive some variant of the following: old and slow. The Eagles looked tired, a team suited to a style of football which had been broken by the hard-pressing, high-pressuring premiers and their copycats.

West Coast’s 2017 list was a premiership-winning list that had never won a premiership. An average of 89 games of experience and a median age of almost 25, their demographics looked like the 2015 Hawks on paper.

Yeah, they scraped into the eight and yeah, they won their elimination final, but both were about as convincing as Luke Shuey’s high-contact free kick on that fateful evening. So the reset began. As we covered in the offseason the Eagles shed almost 1500 games of experience and turned over many of the cogs who’d been brought in to supplement the list since Adam Simpson took over as coach.

A down year looked prospective. No-one told Simpson and his Eagles. Fundamentally this is the same West Coast line up that has been doing work over the past three seasons, just with some youth in place of journeymen and homegrown veterans.

The forward line is a perfect example. West Coast has played four of the six guys who played in the 2015 grand final: Josh Kennedy, Jack Darling, Mark LeCras and Jamie Cripps. Rotating through have been the new guys: Liam Ryan (currently injured), Willie Rioli, Daniel Venebles (also injured), Jake Waterman, and last weekend’s debutant, Jake Petruccelle.

Down back, the team looks strikingly similar too: Jeremy McGovern, (All Australian captain) Shannon Hurn and Brad Sheppard are there. Tom Barrass has taken a tall defender slot, while Liam Duggan has made a half back spot his own. Tom Cole and Jackson Nelson have added the dash.

The trend carries through the midfield too: Nic Naitanui is back punking everyone (while he’s on the ground), Luke Shuey and Andrew Gaff are leading the way, Chris Masten, Dom Sheed and Eliot Yeo are influencing the play. Mark Hutchings has been in and out too.

And, just quietly guys, Andrew Gaff is an inside midfielder now. He’s averaging 9.2 contested possessions, four clearances and 2.5 tackles per game – all career marks – while still maintaining his prolific accumulating abilities on the outside. Extraordinarily, Gaff has played 152 of a possible 153 games since cementing his spot in the team in Round 17, 2011 – the lone miss coming after he was knocked out by Port Adelaide’s Tom Jonas in Round 9, 2016. He’s one of a bunch of Eagles putting their name up for All Australian selection at this early stage of the season.

All told, West Coast has used 14 of its 2015 grand final 22 this season (by contrast Hawthorn has seen 13 of its victorious unit play for it in 2018). The core of the group has changed, but not significantly, yet the team is playing with a vibrancy we had all rightly assumed had passed West Coast by for now. It is like the team as a collective hopped on a plane, went to Germany, got some sort of platelet-rich plasma injection and have been reinvigorated.

Liam Ryan (James Elsby/Getty Images)

Between the arcs
Nowhere has this been clearer than in the midfield. The decision to move Matt Priddis and Sam Mitchell (and, to a lesser extent, Sharrod Wellingham) on despite them having playing contracts for 2019 has proven critical. It’s now Luke Shuey’s midfield, and we can see it in the way West Coast plies its trade.

Where before it was all about careful movement from one end to the other, now the Eagles are among the most active and decisive ball movers in the competition. But unlike the Richmond, Collingwood and other pace-heavy teams, West Coast doubled down on what it did best in 2015: kicking and marking.

They switch everything. The Eagles do not move in straight lines unless there is a forward leading at the ball carrier who looks in position to take a straightforward mark. From the half back line to somewhere inside 50 West Coast moves in side-to-side and 45-degree patterns, carving their way through opposition zones and bringing the whole field into play.

This is supposed to be football death in 2018. The tightly defined zone defences that are now standard across the league make kicking a much more challenging proposition. West Coast has figured out – much like Hawthorn, who we discussed a fortnight ago – that keeping the whole field in play makes said zone defence structures much less watertight.

No team has been less inclined to handball as West Coast. They’re averaging 125.7 per game, more than 30 below the league average and an extraordinary 72 fewer than the most handball-happy team in Collingwood. And you know what? Outside of the chip-around-the-back Western Bulldogs, no team has been tackled less than the Eagles (an opponent tackle rate of 56.2 per 50 minutes) – not even Richmond.

There has been a lot of talk about the ‘rise’ of contested possession this season. The average game has seen 292 contested possessions; the average West Coast game has seen 275, the third lowest rate in the competition.

The Eagles are doing everything to avoid the scrap and scrape of football’s 2018 meta-game, and to date it is working.

It is not dissimilar to the way Adelaide moved the ball so successfully in 2017. There isn’t the same level of rabid intensity that the Crows displayed for most of the year, but the method looks familiar. And West Coast isn’t alone; Hawthorn, Fremantle, Gold Coast and Adelaide are doing similar things. But the Eagles are sticking most doggedly to it.

West Coast’s strengths in recent years have been the bookends; be it personnel or scheme, the Eagles have been good at scoring and stopping teams from scoring on account of their forward and back lines. Where things had fallen down for them in 2016 and 2017 was through the middle. And now that’s been addressed – at face value at least – the club’s strengths are coming back to the fore.

Jeremy McGovern is intercepting opposition marks for fun and causing the opposition headaches in attack. The Eagles’ defensive unit is working to snuff opposition high balls and get into the counterattacking offence quickly. The mid-sized duo of Hurn and Sheppard are critical, albeit the former is a better kick than the latter.

The Eagles are only average for laying tackles inside forward 50 (10.2 per game, ranked eighth), but they get their looks at the goals from the set piece (ranked second for marks inside 50, with 13.8 per game). Forward pressure is important but not paramount, because West Coast know they can move into attack from anywhere on the ground.

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Time to rise?
It has conspired to give West Coast the league’s second-strongest inside 50 differential, with +7.3 per game, without a significant advantage in holding onto the ball (a time in possession differential of +0.4 minutes per game, ranked ninth). West Coast is getting the game on their terms and winning as a result.

But the same question that always comes their way looms once again: can West Coast do it away from home? The Eagles have played four of their six games at Perth Stadium and have to date played the Western Bulldogs and Carlton away from home. According to my strength-of-schedule calculations, the Eagles have played the 17th toughest fixture to this point in the year, behind only the GWS in terms of ease.

Perth Stadium is more in keeping with the dimensions of Docklands than Subiaco Oval – it is both wider and shorter than the Eagles’ old digs. One would assume that is a factor behind West Coast’s embrace of the switch and its expansive kicking game. It also gives the players some practice playing with additional width, crucial to winning finals and premierships for non-Victorian teams.

While a 5-1 start is positive indeed, West Coast’s new modus operandi is yet to be truly tested. Sydney beat them in Round 1, and a weakened Geelong got within 15 points (and broke even on scoring shots) in Round 3. Indeed the Eagles have won both of their close games, and that doesn’t include the win against the Cats.

That test looms. The Eagles have a nightmarish fixture in May: Port Adelaide at home, Greater Western Sydney away, Richmond at home and Hawthorn away. Should the Eagles retain their form, they will feel confident up until their match against the Tigers, which could be a one versus two showdown come Round 9. And the Hawks at the MCG has suddenly become a challenging assignment again.

Each game will test West Coast’s system in a different way. Port will want to make the game more contested and drag the Eagles into the fray. GWS will attack aggressively and back their midfield to control the ground game. Richmond will do Richmond things. Hawthorn will want to play a similar game to West Coast, but with a bit more forward pressure assuming their artists are back.

Even if West Coast drop two of those four games, they will hit Round 10 with a 7-3 record. History shows a team with a 7-3 record through ten games makes the finals almost nine times out of 10. The Eagles, with their pristine ball movement, will be one of those nine.

And as we continue this debate about the ‘state of the game’, the pundits advocating change would do well to look west. The Eagles are showing how football can be played if one is so inclined, and they haven’t needed to alter the fabric of the code to do it.