The West Coast Eagles suffered an overwhelming 70-point defeat at the hands of Narrm on Sunday at Mineral Resources Park.
While the Eagles 2.0 (12) produced a positive display in the first half, the reigning premiers 11.16 (82) overpowered the young West Coast squad and secured the four points on the road.
Getting on the scoreboard early, and then holding Narrm goalless in the second term, positioned West Coast with an attainable margin to chase at half time, but the Eagles fell away after the main break.
“We had little wins around the footy. I thought we were pretty good around the footy with our pressure,” senior coach Michael Prior said.
“But that dropped away after half time. We’ve got to be able to sustain it. I thought we did it for one quarter last week, two quarters this week, but it doesn’t win any games of footy.”
Compared to the third-placed Demons, Prior said the developing Eagles side still has work to do to be able to compete with the benchmark teams.
“I think we’ve got a lot of work to do, we’re miles away from where we want to be, that’s clear,” Prior said.
“But we just look for little wins along the way and improvement in some of our players.
“We had some good players, a couple of our younger girls again today, Ella Roberts and Charlie Thomas down back were outstanding, so we just look for little wins like that along the way.
“Those young girls who can do it against a quality outfit like Melbourne, we’ve got to be happy with that, but we need a lot more girls to come along for the ride.”
It was a tough day out for the Eagles backline, defending 52 inside 50 entries, and Prior said the lack of pressure around stoppages had an impact.
“It was tough on our backs, I think they had three marks inside their forward 50 in the first half which is really good, we defended well,” Prior said.
“But then the second half was a completely different story, they had 19 marks inside their forward 50 in the second half and I thought our backs really fell away with their defensive pressure.
“But we were also getting done around the stoppages and it was walking out the front door so that makes it really hard for our backs to defend that.”
Suffering their third 50-plus point defeat for the season, Prior said it will be up to the coaches and the players to stay motivated for the remainder of 2023.
“To keep the group up, we’ve still got three games to go, we’ve still got a couple of games in there that I believe we can do really well in,” he said.
“I can try and motivate the group as much as I can and I will, but a bit of it is on the players about self-pride and how they want to finish the season off as well.
“We’ll keep them up and about, they’re pretty good, a pretty resilient bunch but they’ve got to drive a lot of it themselves as well.”
