Danielle Laidley: West Coast forced into counterattacking game on the back of clearance calamity

West Coast are 0-8 in 2025 and it sounds disastrous in anyone’s language. Last weekend’s game against Melbourne encapsulates a few positives, but also where the team is struggling this season. It’s perhaps lucky Melbourne are poor at converting inside-50s to scores, otherwise it could have been vastly different from early in the game, with the clearance count 10-0 late in the first quarter. West Coast’s ability to win territory and score directly from stoppages, or get forward pressure to score from turnovers, is of great concern. They are averaging minus-16 inside-50s per game, ranking last (18th). In 2024, they were minus-eight, ranked 16th. The constant negative stoppage and contest is making life very difficult on game day. So why is this happening? Elliot Yeo has been a massive loss. Losing his clearance and contest numbers along with Harley Reid and Tim Kelly not reaching the influence they previously had a clearance and contested possession of 2024 has been a big factor. This is theory only but the lost production from those three players roughly equals the drop off from 2024 to 2025 — minus-19.4 contested possessions and minus-15.7 clearances. When those players were the starting in the midfield in 2024, West Coast were competitive in this area. Each player will have his own reasons as to the why the have been unable to maintain their output. Yeo’s body continues to let him down, Kelly has been dropped and reinstated and Reid has shifted to defence and back into the midfield again after a slow start to the year. McQualter is trying to bridge the gap, Brady Hough, Jack Hutchison, Elijah Hewett, Tyler Brockman, Tom Gross, and other young midfielders have all had a run in the centre square, but it’s a huge ask if they are all in the middle together. Look at the result of Gather Round against Carlton — a 71-point margin, minus-38 inside-50s, minus-22 clearances and minus-41 contested possessions. McQualter has tried Liam Baker the midfield, but he’s also desperately needed across half-back as a running player. He’s also tried Jack Graham, but he’s best suited as a half forward with a huge work rate to be involved in West Coast’s chains of possession and as a pressure player. The midfield drop-off helps us now understand why a lot of West Coast’s offensive play comes from back-half turnovers or kick-ins, and this makes it very hard to win games. There has been much improvement in this area by the Eagles to the point it’s kept them competitive against Essendon and Melbourne in recent weeks. You can see they are training it, chaos ball movement with forward handballs from the defensive half of the ground. West Coast are ranked very high in the competition in this area, and it’s starting to show on the ground as you can see from the above scoring chain graphic. When held up, and it’s not chaos, the Eagles are embracing the long down the line kick. I would say it’s not to get a boundary throw in, because the numbers aren’t good, it’s to get speed off the crumb, and gain territory. They don’t kick-mark out of the backline because of the lack of elite kickers at present, hence Ryan Maric is being used as a distributor and the coach wrestles with Baker and Reid at half-back.