BILL GETS GRILLED – BILL MONAGHAN Q & A

WEST Perth premiership coach Bill Monaghan will be conducting a weekly question and answer segment each week during the 2014 WAFL season for the club's website. Here he is discussing the upcoming Foxtel Cup clash against the Box Hill Hawks at Etihad Stadium on Tuesday night.

QUESTION: Does the Foxtel Cup game come at a good time this week?

ANSWER: The concept of the Foxtel Cup is fantastic and the players are excited about being exposed on national television at the best stadiums in the country. That is stuff we don’t normally get to do. Whether it's the right or wrong time, whether we take a good side or blood kids, is it good to travel are all questions that depend on whether on we won last week or if we win the week after. It's a perception of how we are travelling this season that people formulate whether it's a good thing or bad thing.

What I am excited about is that we will be able to take some players on the cusp of league selection who have been performing well in the reserves, and we will get a good gauge of where they are at against a quality opponent. For us it is an exciting time but clearly if we were 4-2 instead of 2-4 we would be a little bit more excited about, but what is at the back of our minds is the Peel Thunder game the week after we return. That's hard to ignore at the moment, but I'm sure the guys who are selected will give it everything they've got and hopefully we will unearth and expose a couple of young players at our club.

Q: There will be a couple of debutants, but still a very strong team with a lot of premiership players?

A: Without harping on about last year, we did have two teams playing off in grand finals so we think our depth of young players is good. So when I bring a Jack Thrum or a Matt Johnson in at the expense of guys playing league footy, we don’t think there is a big drop off in ability. We are excited. We will pick every side in any competition we play in to win and we think we will pick a side on Tuesday night good enough to win. Whether that proves to be right or wrong, we won't know until Tuesday night.

Q: Is it difficult to prepare for a game with an opposition you don’t know much about, and who might or might not have a lot of Hawthorn-listed players?

A: Being an aligned club with Hawthorn, I don’t know what Hawthorn's mindset is. Box Hill's grand final team last year had 17-listed Hawthorn players and from what I can work out so far this year they have been averaging around 12 to 14 this week so far in the VFL. Generally speaking the AFL clubs aren’t that keen to back up AFL players from a Saturday to Tuesday night. I am going over along with most of the coaches to watch Box Hill on Saturday to get a firsthand look at where they're at, but we might be looking at 10 players who won't play on Tuesday. All we can do is prepare for the way they play and clearly Hawthorn, and by extension I would assume Box Hill, play a fairly noticeable style of football so we will try to pick up on that, and get as much information as we can. We'll try to work out where we think we can expose them and look at their strengths that we need to nullify, and go out and have a crack. That's all we can do. We can't control who Box Hill and Hawthorn put on the park. We think we can be competitive nonetheless.

Q: Confident you will back up OK against Peel Thunder next Sunday?

A: It was a real dilemma for us whether we did what most clubs do and what the two WA clubs did last year which was play Saturday, back up Tuesday night and then have a long break. We toyed with that for a while, but we thought we would go the other way and have the break before. We think that a five-day break with seven, eight or nine players who potentially won't play Foxtel Cup and will play Peel, and our exceptional S & C coach Craig Soley will make sure that those who do play both will be well rested and recovered.

We came up against Swans on a five-day break and they had a four-day break, and I don’t think our loss on the weekend had anything to do with the break either side had going into the game. I went to a conference recently where Darren Burgess, who is back at Port Adelaide after being at Liverpool, produced some strong numbers, albeit related to soccer, to say that we focus a little bit too much on five, six, seven or eight-day breaks when the average break for EPL games is 3.2 days. Whilst it is not a collision sport like ours, they run some exceptional numbers and at high speed.  His GPS numbers he produced on how quickly they run and how many kilometres they cover on what is a fairly small field really amazed me. Given that, maybe talking about the number of days break you have might just be an excuse coaches use to justify their jobs. Given that, a five-day break is not worth talking about.

WITH CHRIS PIKE