A compressed fixture means that it’s all about playing the match, recovering and then preparing for the next contest.

Having played Richmond on Thursday night – four days after a clash with Greater Western Sydney at Optus Stadium – the West Coast Eagles are now preparing for the next assignment against Essendon on Tuesday night.

It will be three games in nine days, making man management a key element in this block of fixtures. So, today’s main training session was more about getting the body moving, getting the legs flowing.

It bore little resemblance to the traditional main session in the lead-up to a game, just arriving at a local in groups of eight or nine, stretching, warming up, a few specific drills and then getting off the track and heading into the gym.

Most of the players in the high performance centre at Sanctuary Cove filtered into this local oval, arriving in mini vans as the maximum allowance was for two of those groups to be on the ground at one time.