BILL GETS GRILLED – BILL MONAGHAN ROUND 11 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 last Saturday's outstanding win over Peel Thunder in Mandurah ahead of the bye this weekend.

QUESTION: You must have not only been happy to get the win against Peel, but also with how well you played? 
ANSWER: Yeah I think both sides were coming off pretty ordinary efforts the week before and it was a really highly uncontested game, but very entertaining for the people who were there. Fortunately enough we were able to come out on top and I'm sure Peel would be disappointed, but I guess both coaches would have been extremely pleased with the better performances.

Q: It was pleasing to watch, but is that the style of football you want your team to play?
A: It's hard to tell. We give up about an average of 21 or 22 scoring shots a week, and we gave up 22 on the weekend. Is that a good or bad thing, it's hard to know. Every now and then you play a game like that and a couple of years we played one against East Fremantle where the kicking was outstanding when we kicked 24.8 and they kicked 21.3. I guess it's just one of those strange days where both sides were really accurate, particularly until we missed three or four in-a-row in the last quarter. We want to defend a bit better than that, but we're also trying to work on scoring a bit more and 26 scoring shots and 17 goals is a pleasing result for us.

Q: You've been trying all season to find more avenues to goal and you had Johnson kicking four, Meadows and Keitel three, and Chalmers two with nothing from Lourey?
A: We're trying to spread the load and not rely on one person, or the same people every week so that when one person is having a down day, and Mike wasn’t fantastic on the weekend and he knows that, but he still takes a good defender and is really strong in the contest. It's probably created opportunities for other guys and that's all that we want. Hopefully Mike in particular will start kicking goals again and we'll keep our numbers up. But I thought Meadows was outstanding for the whole game and whilst Johnson had three to three quarter-time, it was his last quarter with the way he ran around with 13 touches and another goal that I was most pleased with so his performance goes close to being the difference between winning and losing.

Q: The back-line is looking solid as well now with Marcus Adams back, Nick Rodda there and now Sam Rotham able to be the third tall defender, not the No. 1?
A: We are trying to get the right mix down there and we think that Rodda and Adams can still play both ends for us, and so can Keitel so that gives us good flexibility. Marcus and Rods are still relatively young men, and Sam is only new to his craft and Tyler has just made his debut so there's still some inexperience there, but the good thing is that they are all good sizes, mark the ball well and are really competitive. Our big men stocks are in reasonable nick at the moment. Hopefully Jordy Jones will be back within the next month and Max Alexander a little bit behind that, and Joe Morrow is pushing hard for senior selection. We are a lot better placed with our talls than we were four or five weeks ago.

Q: It looked like it was just about Kris Shannon's best game with 27 possessions?
A: His numbers are exceptionally good considering he came off with probably 20 minutes to play and couldn’t return because of a slight niggle in a hamstring. Kris has shown a lot of potential and excitement over two or three years now, and this year it's been steadily building. It was a bit of a breakout game for him and I think he had 19 possessions up to half-time and looked really dangerous. We are still working on some issues with him around delivering the ball, but he is in a unique situation that not many people have to deal with which is having to run at speed, process all the information and kick the ball well. We encourage him to run and that may, in some ways, make the decisions and skill execution a little harder for him, but we saw some really positive signs from him on the weekend and hopefully he will get up for the South Fremantle game. Him and Matt Johnson, in particular, test a lot of sides with their raw leg speed.

Q: How has Rohan Kerr pulled up with his back injury?
A: Rohan's had a scan on his back and it's been an on-going thing with him for a while now. He got twisted in a contest where the ball got smothered off his boot so the bottom half of his body was going one way with the momentum of the smother, and someone came over the top the other way and twisted him. I'm not really all over what the scans he's had done mean, other than he's going to see a surgeon on Monday as well as speaking to our physio, sports doctors and club doctor to get a wide range of views as to what needs to be done. I'm not sure if it requires surgery, but it's not totally out of the question that it might and that would mean he's out for an extended period. There's also a chance that he might be right to play against South, so until he sees the specialist on Monday we are a little bit unsure.

Q: Plenty of practice of dealings with breaks in recent times, what do you do this time?
A: We think that it's fairly standard for us with what we do. We try to lighten the load the first couple of days straight after the game. We gave them Monday night off, Tuesday night they went and did some junior club visitors where they coached the kids in our district and then we stepped the training back up. The last two weekends we've given them it off, but we'll actually train this Saturday and probably do a little bit of running, and more competitive work than we've done over the last couple of byes given we have just had a bye, and we have another one in two weeks time. Then after our next bye, we have an eight-week block without a break so it's more of a work week this week and then we'll probably lighten the load around the other byes to make sure we are fresh for the last part of the season.