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BILL GETS GRILLED – BILL MONAGHAN Q & A

Sunday, July 20, 2014 - 11:39 PM by CHRIS PIKE

WEST Perth premiership coach Bill Monaghan will be conducting a weekly question and answer segment for the club's website. Here he discusses Tuesday night's Foxtel Cup grand final against Williamstown at Geelong's Simonds Stadium.

QUESTION: What approach will you take to recovering from the Foxtel Cup on Tuesday night to playing East Perth on Saturday?
ANSWER: First of all, we were fairly aggressive in our views about whether we should get a four-day break or a five-day break and we probably said some things that were a little bit over the top in context, but we were trying to get them to change their mind. Our view all along was that we would always take the very best side we could to the Foxtel Cup. The logistics of it are that for a normal Saturday game we train Monday, Tuesday and Thursday so the 24 that will travel won't be here Monday or Tuesday and we will leave a squad of about 30 blokes here with some coaching staff to run our usual Tuesday night training, and then sit in our auditorium and watch the game on Foxtel. What we've done different to when we travelled last time when we came home really early on the Wednesday morning and had our training recovery back here in Perth, we are giving the players a sleep in on the Wednesday morning in Geelong. They still will be due back to their hotel by about 11pm and then 11.30pm by the time they have something to eat. They can then sleep in a little in the morning and we'll do our recovery session in Geelong either at a pool or a beach dependant on weather, and we're not flying out of Melbourne until 1pm in the afternoon so that means when they get back on Wednesday afternoon they can just go home and prepare for their one and only session on Thursday. We have kind of flipped that around and there's no need for the coaches to rush back on Wednesday either because there is no training until Thursday.

The beauty for planning in terms of East Perth is that they don’t play this week so we are just planning with what they have done up until now so we will have a fairly good handle on who they will play and the style they will play. It's not ideal to have a four-day break, but our attitude and it has been that way the whole way along, is that we will deal with what we are given regardless of it being four or five days. We will hope that our players are professional enough to look after themselves, it's just a tough ask for the players to have three days in between games and also head back to work on Thursday and Friday and be under the pump to get right to play. It's not as if when we get back to Perth we have the liberty of extra recovery sessions or anything like that, we have to get them to train on Thursday and get through training two days after a game to prove they will be right for Saturday. We probably don’t have the luxury of having a light session, we need to identify the 22 who will be available for Saturday.

Q: How is the team shaping up who you will take for the grand final?
A: Pretty much the process went that the players were asked after the Subi game to let us know if you are unavailable for selection and at this stage we have three players unavailable – Dan Hunt and Matt Guadagnin through work commitments and Kody Manning is injured. We are waiting on Jay van Berlo who broke his nose against Subiaco and has some stitches in there, and needs to get that sorted before he can fly. All the other players have declared themselves available so 18 or 19 of those guys who played against Subiaco are available and then we will top it up with another seven or eight to get that squad to 25 before making our final call on our team. We are pretty comfortable that we will take 24. We will take an extra tall and an extra mid or small-sized player just to make sure that if a small forward pocket goes down we don’t have to replace him with a 6'5 guy and vice versa. That's the rationale behind that but most players want to play Foxtel Cup. They have wanted to play right through. You play at great stadiums and you get to travel. Ultimately whilst the prestige and the want to be a winner of the Foxtel Cup isn’t like wanting to win a WAFL premiership, it's still something that the club wants to do both for the financial rewards and because every time we are in a competition, we want to win. That's our motivation and we are lucky enough to be in it for the second time and we will be doing our best to win. Williamstown will be mighty hard to beat and down in Geelong I'm sure we are not going to be warm and toasty at 8.30pm on a Tuesday night in the middle of July. It's going to be foreign to us, but we are excited by it and then we will dust off and deal with East Perth after that.

Q: Could the adversity and challenges that playing twice in a week bring, with two days of travel thrown in, end up being something to get the group up and going again?
A: That certainly is a possibility. We like to think that every opportunity we get to spend time together, and we don’t get a lot of chances to do that given that we are all workers or students and are here focused on football when at the club, so this is another great opportunity to bond. I'm sure that they aren’t worried about the four-day break. I've read some interesting literature and listened to Darren Burgess talk about how it seems that the length of breaks isn’t that big of an issue as people may have perceived. What can be an issue is repetitive short breaks. So the fact that we have a four-day break followed by a seven-day break shouldn’t be an issue. If we had a four-day break followed by some five-day breaks then the residual effect of that would be enormous. But we think that we will be able to manage it and our players will be professional enough to put their hand up if they are right to go, and if they are not then hopefully they will step aside and we will pick 22 fit players.