NELSON, STRIJK, ADAMS TO LEAD WEST PERTH'S SANDOVER HOPES

AARON Black and Shane Nelson came first and second in last year's Sandover Medal count and there's every chance the West Perth premiership pair will be right among the 2015 top vote winners on Monday night.

Black became West Perth's first Sandover Medallist since Robbie West in 1993 when he stormed home to poll 47 votes last year to take home West Australian football's most prestigious individual award.

That saw him win by one vote ahead of his good mate and premiership teammate Nelson, who has won the last two Breckler Medals and should poll well again in this year's Sandover Medal.

So should Black, but he is ineligible to win after accepting a reprimand early in the season while Andrew Strijk and Marcus Adams are two more West Perth players who could end up polling strongly.

West Perth coach Bill Monaghan expects Nelson to potentially be leading the Sandover Medal up until he battled through the closing parts of the season with an ankle injury, but given he averaged over 32 disposals a game up to that point there's every chance he could have a winning lead.

Meanwhile, he wouldn’t be surprised if last year's winner Black ends up topping the votes again given he rates his season better in 2015 than he had in 2014.

"We'll get a few blokes who will steadily poll but I think Shane is our most realistic chance to win because Aaron can't. But it wouldn’t surprise me at all if he is the leading vote winner at the end of the night," Monaghan said.

"The thing with both Aaron and Shane is that they are both good pollers. I would have thought that after the first four or five games that Aaron has been as good, if not better than he was last year. He has clearly improved.

"It took him a little while to get his head around being the reigning Sandover Medallist and all the stuff that comes with that, but to his credit as a young man he has been able to push through that.

"Up to Round 14 or 15 until he (Nelson) tweaked that ankle, it wouldn’t surprise me that Shane is leading and whether Aaron is able to chase him down or not I'm not sure."

While Strijk is perhaps the most damaging and valuable player in the competition, earning Sandover Medal votes isn’t something he has done a lot of during his career that has spanned 169 games during which time he's played for WA four times, won a Breckler Medal and played in a premiership.

He again has had an outstanding 2015 season with a host of match-winning performances, but Monaghan doesn’t expect the umpires to have taken great notice especially after he received just two votes in 2014.

"We think Strijky is a really important player, he's valuable and you can nearly make an argument that he's our most important player, but he's not a huge vote winner," he said.

"Sometimes that really needs to be taken into consideration. Do I think he will get another votes to win? Probably not especially if Aaron and Shane get what they did last year."

Another player Monahan expects to poll well from West Perth is Adams who has emerged as one of the best key defenders in the competition and plays an eye-catching style with his marking, long kicking and ability to run and carry the football despite being a mountain of a man.

"The other one that is hard to judge is that there was probably six or seven games where Marcus Adams has just been outstanding, but he doesn’t play in the middle of the ground and that's traditionally not a great place to get votes from," Monaghan said.

"But I wouldn’t be surprised that he could get four or five best on grounds. He physically imposes himself on the game and when he does something you notice it not just because of his bulk and size, but it's the way he impacts the game by marking, running and kicking the ball long."