FALCONS FOCUS ON HARD WORK TO EARN ANOTHER CHANCE IN 2016

WEST Perth coach Bill Monaghan comes into his eighth season in charge of the Falcons feeling as though his team is ready to have a crack at going one step better than 2015, but only hard work will enable that to happen.

Monaghan is West Perth's longest serving coach heading into his eighth season in charge having already led the Falcons to a premiership in 2013 and grand final in 2015.

Last year was a tremendous effort by the Falcons to qualify for the grand final, but that last Sunday in September didn’t go to plan resulting in a 66-point loss to Subiaco.

Despite losing some key players in Marcus Adams, Jordan Jones and Ray Bartholomew, Monaghan is confident that West Perth's playing group is well placed to have another strong crack at the flag in 2016.

With the likes of Aaron Black, Shane Nelson, Rohan Kerr, Kody Manning, Laine Rasmussen and Nick Rodda entering their primes, and Aidan Lynch, Corey Chalmers, Tyler Keitel, Trent Manzone, Luke Meadows, Drew Rohde Kris Shannon and Blake Wilhelm ready to further emerge, there is good reason for Monaghan's optimism.

He does know that nothing will come easily for West Perth, though, and only hard work will give them a chance of again being a contender in 2016.

"If you look at our list demographic most of our better players are in their early 20s so we are really buoyed by that, but we know there's a lot of hard work to be done," Monaghan said on Channel 7's West Perth season preview.

"We do think that if we play at our very best we can match it with all the sides and our expectation is that we will play finals footy again."

While the state of West Perth's playing group meant going out on a recruiting spree wasn’t necessary, adding some players who can add some bite never goes astray.

The Falcons did look for some players in particular who could add some quality around goals and Monaghan is confident that Max Duffy (Fremantle, East Fremantle), Keegan Knott (Claremont) and Joel Leeson (Perth) can provide that.

"We've added some forwards with Keegan Knott, Joel Leeson and Max Duffy," he said.

"They are our three main recruits and then we are going to work on developing the rest of the squad with a lot of young blokes who we think will play a lot of football for the years to come. That's mainly our focus."

One hiccup in the preparation for the season for West Perth was a wrist fracture suffered by star midfielder Shane Nelson.

He will miss up to the first eight weeks of the season as a result, but Monaghan is looking for other players step up in the absence of the premiership player and two-time Breckler Medal winner.

"That's unfortunate. He's had an off-season hand injury and he will miss five, six or seven weeks. It's not really set in stone how long that will take but we experienced a fait bit of that last year," Monaghan said.

"For about two thirds of the season we didn’t have anywhere near our full squad so we feel as though we have the depth, but it's always hard to replace the quality of Shane.

"Lynch will stand up and so will Manzone, Mitch Peirce can get an opportunity so we have plenty of options even though we would prefer Shane to be out there obviously."