BILL GETS GRILLED – BILL MONAGHAN ROUND 17 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 loss to Swan Districts, provides an injury update, talks about Aaron Black's 100th game and playing Claremont and Kepler Bradley on Saturday.

QUESTION: Saturday's game saw you in control for most of the afternoon, but then Swan Districts got the last two goals and the siren went a second too soon on Michael Lourey for them to win. How do you reflect back on it?
ANSWER: If you didn’t look at the scoreboard, I would have thought we had a comfortable lead over them most of the day. But the scoreboard is there for everybody to see and we never really kicked away at any stage. We kicked the last two goals of the second quarter to get a bit of a buffer at half-time to have the only real break on them. It was a pretty good game I would have thought with the attack on the footy, and ball movement from both sides even though the skills weren’t great. We're disappointed to lose but Swans would probably think they got one back on us after we were lucky to beat them last time, so let's call it a 1-1 draw and prepare to play them in a few weeks time.

Q: A tight loss like this shows that it was handy to have that bit of a gap in second position to avoid slipping down the ladder?
A: As a coach, I'm never going to say that I'm happy we can afford to drop a game, but a product of winning games earlier in the season is that there is a little bit more room for error. But with our draw and what's going on around us, there's not much room for error from here and we need to get back on the horse quickly, and make sure we win this week.

Q: Missing plenty of experience with Andrew Strijk and Luke Tedesco not playing on top of Rohan Kerr, Matt Guadagnin and Jordan Jones who are out for the year. Happy with how some of the younger guys stood up?
A: We've been happy all along that our players have been able to step up to the mark. Without focusing on injuries, they have been fairly consistent throughout the year but it's slightly different now. Early on in the year it was all our talls getting hurt and now it's our mid-size and utility players. I thought Drew Rohde did a good job down back, Mitch van Berlo was doing a reasonable job until he got injured, Aidan Lynch is continuing to do a fantastic job, Trent Manzone came back in after a few weeks out and did a good job through the midfield. We're young like most sides are at the moment and we have injuries like most sides, so we are only dealing with what we can control and we will put our best 22 out there that we have available this week and try to win a game of footy this week.

Q: You lost Andrew Strijk before the game and then Mitch van Berlo and Kris Shannon got hurt during it. How are they looking?
A: Kris Shannon has been fantastic for us and has really developed throughout the year, but he's done a hamstring and that could keep him out for three to five weeks. Mitch van Berlo has got some sort of shoulder injury but it doesn’t sound like it's overly bad. I'd still expect him to miss a minimum of two weeks, though, and possibly longer.

Q: Your depth continues to be tested?
A: We think we can keep producing sides that can win games of footy and we think there are a lot of guys at our club who can still play league footy. That's been tested on a weekly basis. Strijky should be back this week, Manning probably not, Tedesco is still a couple of weeks away, Corey Chalmers missed last week, played reserves on Saturday and I still think there are a couple of other guys who might debut in the next couple of weeks.

Q: Aaron Black plays his 100th game this Saturday. He has played his whole career under you and ever since you gave him his debut late in the year in 2010, he pretty much hasn’t missed a game. What's he been like to coach?
A: Aaron's a fantastic young player. He obviously wants to achieve a lot out of his football career and I'd be lying to say we haven’t had our minor coach-player run-ins where he hasn’t always readily agreed with the things that I've said about his game, but he's grown and taken that on board. We always come to the mutual ground and he continues to get better. Whilst his first half of the year wasn’t quite as good as the standard he set last year and the last couple of years, I think his last five or six weeks has seen him back to his very best. He thoroughly deserves to play 100 games and at 22 years of age that's a great achievement for someone so young. But like all our young players we expect him to develop and improve, and one of the big challenges for Aaron is that he needs to improve his leadership. There are other young players who look to him for advice and inspiration, and we think that's something that he can continue to develop as well.

Q: Big game against Claremont with you needing to win to stay in second spot but they need to win as well to get back into the top five?
A: They got us last time and their attack on the footy, and the man with the footy last time got us. They also had a significant height advantage which Broady coached well and they delivered on that by keeping on sending the ball long to multiple tall targets, and we struggled with that but that was right at the depth of our big men crisis. They played three genuine ruckmen plus a couple of other key forwards, but we think that if we play our brand of footy in the manner that we should play it that we can beat anyone. It was only a couple of weeks ago that we beat Subiaco with a significant number of people out and losing two players early in the match, so we would think that it's not personnel that stops us winning. We will just need to be at our very best, and we accept the challenge and thrive on the challenge. Our supporters should feel safe in the knowledge that we will play good footy this week.

Q: You won't be thinking about it, but what sort of reception do you expect Kepler Bradley to get in his first game back at HBF Arena as a Claremont player?
A: Kepler who? No seriously I like Kep, he is a ripping bloke and some people at West Perth will probably get annoyed with me saying that, but he's a premiership player here, is well loved by the players and supporters here. But on Saturday he's an opposition player and that's the choice he made, we can't change that now. The fact that Kep used to play here is nearly irrelevant to me as coach. He is now a potentially dangerous opponent after kicking four goals last week, so he's just a faceless opposition player from my point of view. If people want to give him a hard time or heckle him, that's up to them, but for the players we need to stop his influence on the game.