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“That’s an attitude and effort-based trait that is unacceptable. From a team that’s really struggling… you’ve got to show effort at the very least.
“You can be beaten for skill, beaten for class, you can be undermanned with injuries – but you’ve got to show commitment to effort.”
– Jason Dunstall, Fox Footy, June 10 2023
There would be no shame in West Coast being ordinary, run of the mill bad.
No team in modern history has had an injury list as soul-crushing as the Eagles’ in season 2023. Every week it seems a different key player suffers some new misfortune, as if they’re famous baseballers on the Springfield Isotopes team the night before a big game.
Jeremy McGovern, Tom Barrass, Liam Ryan, Jamie Cripps, Liam Duggan, Shannon Hurn and Nic Naitanui are just the most famous names on the injury list – there’s a score more on the sidelines at the moment. No post-mortems on the Eagles are complete without at least acknowledging that this club is in the midst of a run of bad luck no team in living memory has copped before.
This is a team who, in its current state, should probably be losing every match by roughly ten goals. There’s nothing Adam Simpson can do about the lack of experience, match hardness and, most of all, talent that he has at his disposal. Any coach that has to play first his best midfielder in Elliot Yeo, and then his best forward in Oscar Allen, on the opposition’s rampaging key forward because there is literally no other option has my sympathies.
The problem, though, is in proportion. There’s getting smashed, and there’s getting humiliated like the Eagles were by Adelaide on Saturday afternoon – 62 points’ worth of difference, as it were, from that ten-goal benchmark.
There’s getting taken apart by a key forward for whom every possible match-up is in the casualty ward, and there’s letting Taylor Walker kick seven goals by half time and ten for the match, with whatever poor sod minding him given less than no help from up the ground.
No team in the history of the game – with the exception perhaps of Fitzroy in the final three weeks of their tortured exit from the AFL – has been bad enough to make a 122-point loss to a relatively middle of the road side, as impressive as the Crows’ best has been this year, anything less than a disgrace. Fitzroy at least had the excuse of being a literal dead team walking.
I’d say this capitulation to the Crows was as woeful a display as I’ve seen in nearly 20 years of watching footy, except that spot is reserved for their 116-point mauling at the hands of the then-18th placed Hawthorn just three weeks ago. To be this insipid this regularly is as grim as it gets – at least when Melbourne lost to Geelong by 187 points in 2011, it was their only massacre of the season.
This is the Eagles’ third loss by over 100 points in a season that is barely half over, having also been embarrassed by Carlton to the tune of 108 points in Round 7. That’s without even mentioning the two triple-figure hidings they copped in 2022.
We’re looking at a team that is historically bad. And rather than simply laughing at their misfortune and taking pot-shots from the cheap seats, it’s time to run the microscope over exactly why.
I would honestly put about 60 per cent of the Eagles’ problems down to the cattle available – their defence in particular has been totally shredded by injury.
(Photo by James Elsby/AFL Photos via Getty Images)
But best afield for them on Saturday was Bailey Williams, Naitanui’s replacement in the ruck who is looking more and more assured at AFL level with every passing week. Similarly, Tim Kelly, Luke Shuey, Dom Sheed and young tyro Reuben Ginbey is a perfectly reasonable midfield group: on paper at least, you’d expect that quartet to be able to at least break even around stoppages.
That’s at least a starting point to being a competitive team. And it’s at this point that I want to begin comparing the Eagles to the only team in my memory it is reasonably fair to compare them with in their current state: the 2016 Essendon team that lost a swathe of its best and brightest due to the infamous supplements saga sanctions.
That team were bad. Exceptionally bad, because of course they were. Yet on average, they’d concede 107 points per match in 2016, a whole two goals fewer than the Eagles of 2023; coming in an era of higher scoring, with four teams averaging in the triple figures and two others near enough to compared to zero and two respectively this year, and it sheds some light on just where the Eagles’ woes are becoming horrifyingly bad.
The Eagles don’t have McGovern and Barrass at the moment; Essendon went through that whole season without Michael Hurley and Cale Hooker. Their defensive strategy, flimsy as it was, was simple: defend with the ball.
The Bombers ranked seventh in 2016 for average disposals: yes, their games were high-possession affairs and they’d average 16 fewer possessions per match than whoever they were playing, but it’s at least a workable plan. Take control of the footy, rack up heaps of marks – no one that year came close to the Bombers’ haul of 2238 marks – and restrict the opposition to run of the mill thumpings, regular honourable defeats, and if you got really lucky you might sneak a win against a team having a real shocker.
The Dons had heart coming out the wazoo in that year, as any fan who regularly attended matches can tell you: it’s that which is utterly lacking at the Eagles at the moment. Even if more than half their team was capable of hitting a target with any regularity, it’s difficult to imagine too many of them putting in the effort to get into space to be hit up in the first place.
The Eagles are bottom four for disposals this year, and dead last by a long way for kicks. The Bombers’ lowest disposal tally in 2016 was 323 – coincidentally, that’s exactly as many touches as the Eagles amassed against the Crows on Saturday. It’s the fifth time this year they’ve had that many or lower, all coinciding with their most humiliating losses.
The point here isn’t that the Eagles should be playing more like the Bombers of 2016; more that there are ways for even historically horrific teams filled with players not up to the standard to be somewhat competitive, and dignified in defeat.
Notably, the Eagles had a season-high 392 disposals in their honourable loss against Collingwood a week ago, dominating the clearances and being beaten not by effort, but by execution. If you’re a West Coast fan, and that’s the standard you got every week, it would at least be an acceptable starting point. And with the midfielders they have available – Shuey’s return from injury gave them pretty much all the stars from their 2018 premiership – it’s at least an attainable goal.
Yet with the best midfield group they’ve had all season, they amassed 101 fewer disposals than the Crows, had nine fewer clearances, and most unforgivable of all, conceded 14 goals from stoppages and eight from centre bounces directly. What in God’s name is Rhett Bazzo meant to do against Taylor Walker if, from an even keel, the area of the ground supposed to be your strength is getting pantsed so totally?
There are two main reasons the Eagles can’t get their hands on the ball: firstly, their personnel, and secondly, their structure. To begin with personnel, a lot of their issues at the moment can be nicely summed up by Andrew Gaff.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a once-great footballer fall so completely off the cliff as this man has, over the last two seasons but especially this year. As the weeks have gone on and the losses have mounted, his performances have become more and more inexcusable for a player of his calibre, especially in a team that desperately needs all of its fit senior heads to lift.
Gaff was once the king of outside footy: he’d average near enough to 500 uncontested possessions a season for a five-year stretch between 2015 and 2019 where he was probably the Eagles’ best player in an era where they made finals every time, won a flag and made another grand final. Time and again, he’d bust a gut out into space on first the Subiaco Oval wing and later the vast expanses of Optus Stadium, rack up uncontested marks, and propel the Eagles forward with precise short kicking.
For a man who was once a reliable 30-disposals-a-match man, a trait his team could really use right now, Gaff has hit 20 disposals just once since Round 6. His 16 against the Crows – though with not a single mark – was actually a reasonable effort by his standards these days, and his rundown tackle to get a consolation goal in the second half the first properly good thing I’ve seen him do in that time. It was also his first goal since Round 12 last year.
Gaff’s running power is still there – at one point recently he was averaging nearly a kilometre per disposal – but it’s aimless running, running to check a box rather than to be dangerous or create. After being a regular at centre bounces, he hasn’t attended one in more than a month, even with the likes of Shuey and Sheed out and Yeo being mostly a half-back these days.
He’d give up four free kicks for his trouble against the Crows, make five clangers, and perform at the level you’d expect of a kid like Campbell Chesser and not a veteran of this team. If he indeed stayed at West Coast in 2018 because he felt he owed the club after that Andrew Brayshaw king-hit that cost him a premiership medal, he’s got a funny way of repaying them at their time of greatest need.
I’m happy to be harsher on Gaff, a player who is proven to be well and truly of AFL standard, than poor guys like Greg Clark, Xavier O’Neill and Luke Foley, who are probably not, or youngsters like Noah Long, Bazzo and Campbell Chesser, who might be one day but are getting one hell of a rough introduction. Attacking the ball and tackling as ferociously as a 13-game teenager like Reuben Ginbey should be a minimum standard, and it’s one that he’s failing week after week after week.
Honestly, you might as well give Zane Trew, a youngster named as a sub, a full game ahead of Gaff if this is what he’s going to produce. There were other Eagles who played worse against the Crows, but none of them are the wrong side of 30 and seemingly more than happy to run out the clock in a team falling apart at the seams. And if the argument is that it’s hard to be good in a sucky team, it’s worth pointing out that Tim Kelly is having a quite wonderful season against all those odds.
This vision from late in the third term probably sums it up: you can’t tell me this total lack of effort or willingness to get in the way of Darcy Fogarty’s lead is the action of a man who’s serious about his footy at the moment.
Jack Darling at least doesn’t look fit enough to be playing under normal circumstances to deserve the same amount of criticism – though it must be said, he’s looking decidedly cooked as a footballer too.
Still, given every week I watch a totally washed Jack Riewoldt guile his way into three or four goals, I think you’ve got to expect more from Darling, even if getting him only 34 inside 50s in a full match is a long way short of okay.
At least Yeo, who can barely string five games in a row before injuring something else these days, clearly gives a damn: he fought unsuccessfully but admirably to curtail Walker when he’d given Bazzo a predictable bath, before switching onto the ball in the second half and providing five clearances and some badly needed grunt work to assist Kelly and Williams. Yeo’s 30 disposals and 566 metres gained meant he could walk off Adelaide Oval with head held high; Gaff, meanwhile, deserved to have his head tilted at an even more neck-cricking angle than it usually is.
But it’s unfair to single out Gaff, because he wasn’t responsible for the day’s two biggest howlers. That honour goes to Dom Sheed, who has actually been the Eagles’ best by a street over the last month; this is where structural issues come into the picture.
I’ve watched the below video six times now and am convinced it’s the most pitiful stoppage of 2023.
No wonder the Crows ripped the Eagles a new one with stuff like this. From a boundary throw-in, with time given to set up correctly, Sheed, an established gun of this team, is in no-man’s land. I imagine his role was probably to plug the attacking lane inside 50 – a pointless exercise given there was nobody in the space behind the competing ruckmen – but in any case, he gives up that position to make the most half-hearted of efforts to block Ben Keays’ close checking of Kelly.
Good teams do this superbly – Adelaide do it for Izak Rankine’s opponent at just about every forward 50 stoppage – but even bad teams don’t do it as disastrously as what Sheed goes for here. As a result, when his direct opponent Lachie Murphy has the ball, Sheed is nowhere near him, and nor are any of his teammates.
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It’s the simplest thing in the world for Murphy to gather from a perfect Reilly O’Brien palm, run unopposed to 50, and drill a goal.
At least when Hawthorn concede easy stoppages goals, they do it because their first instinct is to attack, and that occasionally punishes them the other way: Sheed here starts in a position where his only use is to be defensive, and then wanders away. It’s maddeningly bad.
It happened again in the third quarter: Sheed allows his direct opponent Lachie Sholl to start goal side of him at the stoppage, and when he realises O’Brien’s tap is going straight to him, the Eagle stops dead, doesn’t even bother to chase, and watches as Sholl waltzes away and kicks the easiest goal he’ll ever kick.
I’m most upset about these disasters because the midfield is the one place on the ground the Eagles can actually hope to be competitive. Defensively, they’re an irredeemable mess, both one-on-one and structurally, and there are too many examples of things going belly-up to count; up forward, it’s Allen or bust, because their small forwards all got injured in the Derby and Darling is obviously not right.
After 31 games, Foley simply has to be better than this: I’ll give him as much benefit of the doubt as I can for the below goal that his aim was to stop Walker swinging back onto his preferred right foot, but even then, he a) should have known that the more dangerous space was always going to be on the inside rather than out towards the boundary, and b) put in an effort to recover that was about as pathetic as it gets.
As a team, they’re not helping matters, either: as ugly as the below scrubbed kick under pressure from Foley again is, the lack of support is telling. As Izak Rankine pounces on the crumb to kick an easy goal, you can see it’s four on four in the goalsquare: the very least a bad team should be doing is flooding back numbers to help an under siege defence. Where the hell was everyone?
If the point of the exercise was to find positives, then yes, there were a few. Williams gives his all every week and is becoming a quality follow-up ruckman, even if his tapwork will probably never be A+ quality.
Tim Kelly leaves every week knackered and constantly gives his team the best chance he can to score: his 44 per cent disposal efficiency from Saturday’s game annoys me, because it’s not his fault he’s kicking to blokes getting outmarked or outcompeted at every second contest.
Ryan Maric played the sort of low-disposal, high-impact game that is all you could ever expect for a forward in a team getting belted: from limited opportunities, his smarts to read the ball off the boot earlier than Crow Jordan Butts got him a goal with his first kick, while his follow-up efforts later on for a second goal should honestly be packaged up and shown to Darling during the week.
I love Ginbey, too, and honestly, were it not for Jack Trengove getting his career torpedoed at Melbourne by being named captain of an awful team, I’d suggest he might as well take over from Shuey next year, because by that point he’ll probably be the Eagles’ best player.
Jayden Hunt put in a shocker on Saturday but has been a great pick-up all year doing the things Gaff should be doing; I’ll die on the hill that Jack Petruccelle’s pace and goal nous make him exactly the type of player Carlton are crying out for; Sam Petrevski-Seton makes it easy to criticise him because his hair is immediately distinguishable from anyone else going around, which is something positive at least.
You already knew the Eagles were God awful. But I hope this at least has provided some insight into why they are so awful, and why, injuries or no, fans and detractors of this once-proud club have a right to demand better.
There are 11 weeks left this season to show some fight, and some key players likely returning after next week’s badly needed bye.
Over to you, West Coast.
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