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 discusses West Perth's season to date in the WAFL.

QUESTION: How would you sum up the losses to South Fremantle and Swan Districts since the big win over East Perth?

ANSWER: Clearly the East Perth game was fantastic and I thought against South we struggled a little bit against their pressure, and they came pumped up to play. At times we turned the ball over because of the pressure that South put us under, but having said that we still had enough opportunities for a large part of that game to kick a winning score, but we didn’t. It was the same thing against Swans.

We are our own worst enemy at the moment and we are struggling not knowing if it's form, a structure thing or a personnel thing. Most of the indicators are pointing back to us not being able to maintain possession of the ball particularly across half-back and coming through the middle of the ground, and not being able to hurt sides through scoreboard pressure.

Whilst in no way we are doing everything well, it's probably our inefficiency by foot that is the contributing factor to where we are at.

Q: A lot of players in your team are usually good kicks, but right now enough targets just aren’t being hit?

A: It's a difficult thing to coach as well. Do you point out clear mistakes that no one is trying to make or do you go the other way and focus on the positives of when it works. The answer is probably somewhere in between. We have to keep challenging each other to get our kicking up to an acceptable level, and we need to do that at training and to expect that in a game. We also need to clearly state those expectations without making the players feel bad about the way they are kicking the ball. At the end of the day, I'm confident that the players aren’t trying to make mistakes and we know that there are enough players there who can kick the ball, but just aren’t kicking it well at the moment. The law of averages says it has to turn at some stage and we are getting at that stage now where we can't allow it to go for much longer.

Q: Andrew Krakouer has two games under his belt now and every one of his kicks has resulted in a score. Do you only expect him to keep improving now?

A: Andrew, like all of us, would have liked a little more output than he's given us, but it probably hasn’t helped that he stepped into a side that hasn’t been winning. Therefore a lot of focus shifts on to whether or not Andrew is fit or should he hold his spot in the side or not, which is unfair. On Anzac Day, he had seven kicks as a permanent forward pocket and had seven shots on goal. He kicked 3.4 and if it was 5.2 everyone's happy, 6.1 we are elated and seven straight we are running around the park singing the club song.

Andrew has set really high standards for himself over a number of years and he still has those high standards, and we expect him to keep improving. What we need to do is take a bit of the focus off Andrew by doing some of the things we usually do well a lot better. People need to be talking about West Perth and not Andrew Krakouer. That is as much our responsibility as it is his and he has got enough training under his belt, we just need to make sure that we are giving him every opportunity to excel.

Q: How would you sum up the first six games of the WAFL season before the energy boost that the Foxtel Cup win has given the club?

A: We are probably not doing anything exceptionally well. Our clearance numbers are good, but sometimes the quality of exiting the clearances and whether we score from them is something we grapple with them all the time. On raw numbers our clearance stats are good and on raw numbers the amount we go inside the forward 50 compared to the opposition is good, but it's not translating on the scoreboard. The fundamentals of our ball movement and our ability to get the ball in scoring positions are good, so it just keeps coming back to our kicking. What we are probably not doing is that we aren’t doing everything to the maximum. We are doing most things pretty well, but we're not at our best with our attention to detail and doing all the little things right whether that's keeping our feet, tackling, getting the ball out of bounds and making a contest. There are probably eight or 10 little things that in isolation don’t make a huge difference, but when you put them together they do. Our greatest strength is to tick all those boxes and leave nothing to chance, but we have given our opposition through a number of areas the opportunity to hurt us going back the other way.

WITH CHRIS PIKE