BILL GETS GRILLED – BILL MONAGHAN Q & A

WEST Perth premiership coach Bill Monaghan will be conducting a weekly question and answer segment for the club's website. Here he discusses the last up loss to Subiaco and looks to this week's clash with East Perth.

QUESTION: The game with Subiaco was similar to a lot of others this season where you had a good period for about 30 minutes to have a chance of winning, but then struggled in other parts of the game to come up short. What did you make of it?
ANSWER: Yeah it was very symptomatic of where we've been all year. The bottom line is that we haven’t been able to be at our best consistently throughout one game, let alone for a period of games. There's some certain things missing with our forward pressure especially. Whilst the stats will say that we are still defending reasonably well, we've gone away from team defence and probably now are relying on our back six to stop goals. The form of Hunt, Strijk, Rasmussen and Jones has been really strong to help with that. We are relying more on that than we are on our forward pressure and repeat 50 entries so we are allowing the opposition sides too much ball through the middle of the ground and some of their entries are quality going inside their forward 50.

In hindsight we have probably been a little lucky not to have conceded more scores than we have, but having said that whilst we are highly critical of our pressure in the forward third, we have a young and developing forward-line that's been built at the moment around Nick Rodda, who has recently turned 20, and Marcus Adams, who has recently turned 21. It's a developing forward-line.

Q: When you have patches like either side of three quarter-time against Subiaco when you cut a 46-point deficit to 12, what is working well for you and then what isn’t working when you aren’t playing so well in matches?
A: Generally it's about linking possession together, that's been our biggest problem but we could probably go back to last year and back onto the previous point I made, we didn’t rely on kick, mark play in our forward 50 last year. What we did rely on was once the ball got in our forward 50 it stayed there until we either scored or forced a stoppage. We have been exposed significantly on turnover and one of the problems is that we have been trying to rectify that, which means that in a lot of ways we are getting away from what we believe is being a defensive unit. For the want of a better word, we are starting to cheat to get into space. When it works, it looks great but it's not sustainable.

Over a six or seven-week period now, we have been trying to work on ways to create more scoring opportunities but unfortunately that isn’t necessarily being built around top-end forwards. We have to find another way to do it, but having said that we think that if Nick Rodda and Marcus Adams are here for a long period of time, they are going to prove to be a very potent forward pairing in years to come. But they're not there yet and we've got a fair amount of improving across the board to do. We are more interested at the moment in the Johnsons, Antonios and Crisps to join Kody Manning in putting decent pressure on the opposition. The stat from the Subiaco game was alarmingly poor. I pulled up four or five of the smaller Subiaco forwards and compared them to our four or five comparative players, and I think the tackle count was 29 to four in their favour. That there is the problem.

Q: Kody Manning and Steve Potente have been your best forward pressure players this year and neither had an impact against Subiaco. Was it simply that you missed them or shouldn’t it matter what personnel is available?
A: In theory it shouldn’t matter who's there, but Kody Manning at his best, and obviously he got a decent shoulder injury eight minutes into the game, and Steve Potente wasn’t there at all, and we haven't been able to find other players who can consistently perform at that level of pressure. Then Jason Salecic and Josh Mellington were there for us last year and are very good in that area as well. The answer is that it's somewhat to do with personnel, but as I've said all through my time here, to defend is an attitude and it's not something that is impossible for anyone to do. At the moment we have a group of players playing those roles who aren’t prepared to do it on a consistent basis, and that's disappointing.

What we need to do is to keep expecting those people to keep improving and setting them standards to meet, and if they can't then we have to find someone else who will. The flipside is that if you look at someone like Hayden Ballantyne, his pressure skills are elite and he's also a very good goalkicker. The perfect combination is someone to do both of those things. If all our forwards do is tackle, we still won't kick a goal. Someone has to kick the ball through the big sticks and we need players to do that. Kody Manning is as good at putting pressure on as there is but he was hampered against Subiaco and he won't play Foxtel Cup, and he could miss a couple of weeks. He is not a big goalkicker, though, but you have to weigh up how many he can create for people around him. Last year we had a flow-on effect. They would run into Kody, if they got out of that they would run into Mello, if they got out of that they would run into Jason Salecic and then Marc Crisp would pick up the ball and kick the goal. It was a chain of events and this year's it not. It's one person doing it and we're not getting any significant reward for that. The six of them aren’t working in unison and then the mids aren’t playing their role and it's catching us out across the ground.

Q: How do you now approach these last six games?
A: There has been a lot of talk over a number of weeks about whether we will play finals and if we can play finals, and I've probably been sucked in a little bit to answer those questions. What we need to do is keep improving. What we have dished up this year clearly isn’t good enough and I put all the players on notice on Tuesday night after the Subiaco game to say that it's now even more important that we do everything right. It's nearly like players are auditioning in next year's team as much as they are for this week whether that be East Perth or the games after that. The focus for us is that we want to win every game, that's a given but we are prepared to say that there also needs to be some development and we may play players in other spots to see and gauge. We pushed Marcus Adams back in the second half against Subiaco and he held his own against a quality forward in Shane Yarran in a side who got a large number of inside 50s. We did that to release Jordan Jones into the midfield so we are going to continue to experiment but the players should be left in no doubt about our expectations as a coaching group, and certainly from the leadership group in the club that we need to raise the bar and not just meander through the rest of the season.