BILL GETS GRILLED – BILL MONAGHAN ROUND 5 Q & A

WEST Perth's longest-serving coach Bill Monaghan discusses the Falcons' bounce back win over Peel Thunder on Good Friday and how they responded to the big loss to South Fremantle six days earlier.

Monaghan caught up with the team from WAFL World on 91.3 SportFM do discuss that and look ahead to this Saturday's clash at HBF Arena against Swan Districts.

QUESTION: You must have been happy with the response to the previous week's loss to South Fremantle?
ANSWER: It was chalk and cheese and we are feeling a lot happier now than we were this time last week. All credit to the players for that. We had a fairly light week with a bit of soul searching done and the players responded remarkably well. Our start was fantastic. We let it slip a little bit in the third quarter but finished off strongly again. I'm really proud of the way the players responded and it's great to come away from Good Friday with a win.

Q: You decided to throw the challenge to Scott Simpson to carry the ruck and he did an outstanding job?
A: We think Seva Mozhaev has been doing a really good job with his ruck work and tapping but we haven’t been getting a lot around the ground from Sev. We are working with him on that. We made that decision fairly early in the week and we just thought we would try and run Peel a little bit. They had Jonathon Griffin and Sean Darcy and we just thought if we had a more mobile ruckman we might be able to get an advantage. To end up with 27 touches was good. But I did show a video clip at our meeting that he got outrucked at one stage by Rory O'Brien so Scott has a fair bit of work to do on his ruck work. But his follow up at ground level was outstanding.

Q: You had plenty more players contributing strongly than you did against South Fremantle?
A: Unfortunately a couple of people lost their spots because of that and Sev was one of them, but so was Mitch van Berlo and Nathan Alexandre who had been playing pretty solid defensive games. We had to change it a little bit and we put some different blokes behind the ball to give us a bit more run. Individually I'm not overly concerned who gets the touches but when you have a dozen blokes who hardly touch it for the day something has to change. What we changed structurally against Peel worked but it's just one game. We need to be very good this week against a side who is 4-0 but I'm really pleased with what we did on Friday. We just need to challenge the players again this week to make sure it keeps working.

Q: You take on the only undefeated side left in the competition, Swan Districts, now on Saturday at HBF Arena?
A: The rivalry between us and Swans over the last four or five years has been really strong. We both have really passionate groups of supporters and we tend to have reasonably good crowds, and some really entertaining games. A lot of them are close games which is always great for the fans. They are going to be a huge challenge. They have five or six AFL-listed players coming back into the club, they've still got a strong core of players through Ames, Riggio, Notte, Ugle and guys like that who have been around for a long time and they are flying at the moment. We just need to be really strong around the contest, run really hard and use the ball well. We are looking forward to the challenge and it's really important that we back up last week's game. We were poor against South and great against Peel so we need to put another good performance in.