BILL GETS GRILLED – BILL MONAGHAN ROUND 3 Q & A

WEST Perth premiership coach Bill Monaghan discusses Saturday's International Football Festival game against Subiaco, provides an injury update on some key players and looks ahead to this Saturday against East Fremantle at ATOM Stadium.

QUESTION: You started the second half on fire and took the lead but that only seemed to spark Subiaco into action?
ANSWER: That's not unusual for them, they are a very good side and they've shown that for a couple of years. As a coaching staff, it's a really difficult game to assess but the bottom line is we were well beaten and we're disappointed in that. The positives are that when we stuck to what we had planned and moved the ball the way we wanted to, and defensively held them up we were in the game. It wasn’t a great first quarter, a lot better second quarter and I thought for the majority of the second quarter we were all over them but just couldn’t capitalise deep forward especially in the marking department. Then the first five or 10 minutes of the third quarter was outstanding, so there were a lot of positives and even in the last quarter we kicked three or four on the back of some good ball movement. But the flipside is we were easily beaten and we need to work out if we couldn’t maintain that for four quarters because of our work rate and effort, or it was how hard they work. There's lots of good learning out of it but the bottom line is we are 1-2 and lost by a significant margin so we are obviously disappointed.

Q: What sets them apart from the rest of the competition at the moment?
A: They are strong over ball, they've got multiple options forward and they've got a well organised defence. But the one thing is that they have great belief in what they're doing. They work hard to get into the right areas and you have to be very, very good and switched on mentally and physically to beat them. They are going to be hard to beat but we'd like to think that if we get it right and show more of what we did well, we can take it up to them. Not that this any way changes the result but I would have thought Manning, Rasmussen, Nelson and Keunen would make a significant difference to our side. They might argue the same with Halligan and Broughton but just in the way we want to move the ball and our attack on the footy, we were a little bit off our best. Whether or not we can cover that is being shown at the moment that maybe we can't. For the third week in a row we've lost the possession count so we have to find more ways to win enough of the footy.

Q: How much does that have to do with the absence of Shane Nelson, not only what he does but the flow on effect because now other players like Aaron Black get tagged and Jay van Berlo and Aidan Lynch have to do a lot of the hard work?
A: Everyone always talks about the effectiveness of Shane's possessions but when you have someone who can rack up 28, 29, 30 possessions at will and regularly gets 35-plus, it does give you first use of the ball around stoppages and gets you in the forward half. What we are probably struggling with is that we aren’t getting a lot from our outside mids. This week we used Kerr, Shannon, Meadows and Leeson, and they aren’t finding enough of the footy on the outside. What we have found the last couple of years is that Kerr and Black are 26, 28-possession winners as well on the outside so it's difficult to take that away. We had 23-25 inside 50s at half-time and we were in the game but it ended up 62-45 in their favour. That weight of numbers and quality of forwards, and their pressure and big bodies wore us down, and we weren’t able to cope with that.

Q: Three weeks in now, do you need to start getting a bit more from some of your key players like Nick Rodda or Max Duffy?
A: It's an interesting one. Nick's never been a big ball winner and we judge him on how he competes, and Nick and us are both probably disappointed with the way he's going. But that's not a huge problem. I think Duffy had 11 possessions and kicked a goal so that's not far off in those positions to be right. We needed to get a lift out of a lot of players and I think Nick's better than that, I think Max is better than that and we don’t think we are anywhere near our best yet. We need to make sure that we find a way to win games and we were poor in the first week, but last week the form isn’t too bad given Perth has beaten Claremont this week. Then for two and-a-half quarters this week we were around the mark. We aren’t that far off but we have to do some improving.

Q: Can you provide an update on the injuries to Chris Keunen and Kody Manning?
A: Chris Keunen had an X-ray early in the week that cleared him and then he had an MRI later in the week and he looks like he has a fracture in his knee. I haven't spoken to him since he was due to go and see an orthopaedic surgeon but I would have thought even at a minor level a bone fracture is a six to eight-week injury. Manning's a strange one. He got a significant cork around the shin and calf that bled significantly last week so he's struggling to put weight on that. But that will resolve quickly once it starts resolving but at the moment it's black and blue and he's struggling to put weight on it. I'd say he's less than 50-50 to play against East Fremantle but I'm pretty confident he'll play the week after.

Q: Without Keunen, it's a big chance for Seva Mozhaev to grab his opportunity and he did have 57 hit outs?
A: We got Sev over a couple of years ago as part of a succession plan for when Chris decides to pull up stumps. Obviously Sev missed all of last year with a knee reconstruction and he made a good return. He is a developing footballer so we expect that there is going to be some improvement and he hasn’t played a lot of league footy. He gave our mids first use of it with the number of hit outs but we did get beaten in the clearances. We've got a couple of other options. Hamilton played Round 1 and hasn’t played since but he can come in and do some back up ruck work, and so can Rodda and Keitel. At least in the short term it will be Sev doing the ruck with some pinch hitters around so it's a really good time for him to develop his craft. We just need to get a little bit more out of that. The numbers were 70 to about 30 hit outs and we lost the clearance count. Maybe Subi didn’t really care if they won the hit outs or not and that's something that isn’t uncommon for one side to dominate the hit out count but not the clearances.

Q: Thoughts on taking on East Fremantle this Saturday on the road?
A: They will be pretty confident down there and probably even more confident after watching us this week. I haven’t seen a lot of them and with Peake back, they've added Watson up forward they've got a little bit more scoring power than they probably had last year. There's no O'Brien or McGough so it's a bit of a different midfield so I'll sit through their first game and watch them. They run the ball well through the middle of the ground, they rebound well off half-back and have some dangerous forwards. We will need to be good to beat them.