BILL GETS GRILLED – BILL MONAGHAN ROUND 18 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 10-point win over Claremont at HBF Arena and looks ahead to Sunday's derby with East Perth at Medibank Stadium.

QUESTION: You had to find something at three quarter-time and it helped that you finished with the breeze, but that didn’t do it all for you. You must have been happy with the last quarter especially the first 16 minutes where you kicked five goals?
ANSWER: It was done on the back of winning some stoppages and I thought Chris Keunen's ruck work in the last quarter, and Jay van Berlo's clearance work was fantastic. He had some allies in there and Lynch was good all day with his pressure, and Manzone was good but I really thought Jay lifted in the last quarter and then the ball was played in our third. Our defensive mindset changed and I thought we pressured the ball carrier to force a lot of errors, and didn’t allow them to come back through the middle like they did for three quarters. It was really pleasing but it took that long for us to get on top in the stoppages and rather than kicking wide, we kicked long down the middle and had a good contest. Nick Rodda going forward was important after he did a reasonable job down back, but he really gave us a contest. It was good to win in the end but it took a little longer than we would have liked.

Q: They had the momentum at three quarter-time up by 21 points and with them having kicked the last four goals. Were you still confident going into the last quarter?
A: I reckon for the first 10, 12 or 13 minutes of the third quarter we were all over them but again we didn’t get any reward for that and then every time they seemed to go forward in the third quarter they kicked a goal, which was really disappointing. We gave up a goal late in the second quarter after Aaron Black could have easily stepped one over the boundary line, but instead kicked out of bounds and Keifer Yu kicks one from 55. We gave away another shot for goal late in the third quarter too so we were doing enough wrong that we thought we could turn it around and the inside-50 count was always with us for the day. It was about minimising our errors but Seaby was clearly hampered so that meant that Cameron pretty much ran a lone hand in the ruck and I thought Darcy was fantastic in a good battle against Tyler and Chris for us. We were able to run over the top and at three quarter-time I was still confident because that was the scoring end. I'm not sure it was a huge breeze, but it seemed enough to be worth a couple and then we got our tails up, and all of a sudden started to run hard.

Q: Corey Chalmers had a big second quarter with three goals and Blake Wilhelm was good off half-back in his second game?
A: It's well documented that we haven’t always been able to field our best side in terms of experience and we're playing a lot of young kids who are developing and cutting their teeth. One of the products of that is that we are making more errors than I would like, but the exciting part is that when they get it right they are good players. I thought Corey's goal sense and ability to defend in the forward half was important. Blake's from a basketball background and didn’t play a lot of footy, but has come to us after playing State league basketball and had to basically learn how to play footy again. I'm really impressed with his efforts and I thought Matt Johnson showed good glimpses and Tyler Keitel was good. Some people don’t always give credit to how young some of our other better players are and Nick Rodda is 21 years of age, Marcus Adams is just 22 and they are holding down really important roles in our structure. We're a young group and I think last week was just over 22 years of age in average and we wouldn’t have been any older this week. 

Q: Aidan Lynch was again fantastic and he just works so hard, and laid another 13 tackles?
A: We love the way Lynch goes about it. We've had a little bit of time to try and get his body right  because he doesn’t have the typical body shape and size of an elite midfielder at our level, but he worked hard last year. A lot of people were critical that he couldn’t force his way into league footy but we tried to get him to a standard with his work rate that we thought would hold up against other sides in league football. He's coming off being the best player in the reserves last year and he's been able to hold his own, but his body strength and will to defend in close and generally his ball handling are all really good so we are impressed with what he's doing.

Q: Important win because it pretty much guarantees that you will play finals, and keeps you in second spot?
A: We're really happy to be 10-5 after 15 games and whether it secures a spot in the finals is something that's mathematically still not the case, but 10-5 with a healthy percentage you'd think we only need one more win to make it a certainty. But our aim is to finish in second spot with top spot probably not attainable. A two or three position, hopefully two, finish would be great so that we could play a final here at the Arena.

Q: Huge derby now on Sunday with East Perth needing to keep winning to stay in the top five, but they are coming off a 106-point win over South Fremantle?
A: We are one-all this year so far and we go back to Leederville Oval and play them on a Sunday, which is a little bit different. They must have been fantastic to beat South Fremantle how they did, but we are fairly confident all the time that our very best is good enough to match it with anyone. But they are going to be a huge challenge and when they've been good this year, they've been very good. That may fluctuate on team selection so it's a matter of seeing who they put out there and taking the game on full on. We'll get three or four back over the next month or so and the guys in the side at the moment are playing for spots hopefully in the finals, so they'll keep pushing and trying to improve. That's the aim anyway.

Q: How close has Callum Papertalk been to making his debut this year and does seven goals in the reserves get him over the line next week?
A: Cal's been an interesting one. He had a really good pre-season and was playing mainly down back and on a wing, and there weren’t many spots opening up for him. He's pushed forward over the last month or five weeks and he's kicked a fair chunk of goals. He's been close a couple of times and 7.5 is pretty hard to ignore. We think Cal has got the ability to play league footy but he's been out of the system for a couple of years playing community footy, and he's probably developed a couple of bad habits having been able to run around and do whatever he wanted. But we think if he sticks with it and goes through the process of what we need him to do, he could play league footy. I'm sure if kicking 7.5 is the final nail to say that he will play, but it can't do any harm.