More than once in recent weeks I have heard West Coast people make the comparison between the Eagles of 2023 and the 2018 team.
Nobody saw West Coast coming in 2018. They had retired Matt Priddis, Drew Petrie and Sam Mitchell after bowing out in the 2017 semi-finals and they had three youngsters making their debuts in Round 1 2018 against Sydney: Liam Ryan, Jake Waterman and Daniel Venables.
For the sake of their season, I sincerely hope the Eagles aren’t thinking this is going to be 2018 2.0.
Apart from the fact that every team’s circumstances in every season is different, the key difference between this team and the 2018 unit is that their kids in 2018 were older and ready and the veterans were younger and still in their primes.
Mark Lecras was the oldest Eagle on the field in Round 1 of 2018 at the age of 31. Daniel Venables was the youngest at 19 years and 126 days, a couple of hundred days younger than Waterman.
The rest were in between with a top end core at the peak of their ability. Josh Kennedy didn’t play in Round 1 but hadn’t turned 30 yet. Shannon Hurn, the captain, was only 30. Jamie Cripps, Jack Darling, Andrew Gaff, Jeremy McGovern and Scott Lycett were 25, Elliot Yeo was 24, Nic Naitanui 27, Jack Redden and Luke Shuey were all 27, Brad Sheppard 26.
This is the age demographic of most teams in flag contention.
This was the core of the premiership team, even if Gaff, Naitanui and Sheppard didn’t make it onto the field on Grand Final day.
Yeo won the best and fairest. Redden was runner up. Shuey won the Norm Smith Medal. Kennedy and Darling kicked 91 goals between them. McGovern, Hurn and Gaff were all All-Australians.
Of their kids, Daniel Venables and Jake Waterman were playing their first games against the Swans but were in their second seasons at the club. Liam Ryan was in his first AFL season but had already completed two stellar seasons in the WAFL at Subiaco.
Another so called youngster in 2018 was Willie Rioli but Rioli was already 22 at the start of the season.
Compare that to the team that took the field against Adelaide on Friday at Mineral Resources Park. Hurn is 35, Shuey 32, McGovern and Gaff 30, Kennedy and Redden retired. Naitanui when he does play will be 32. At best, this is a team in transition. At worst, if they can’t find more kids like Reuben Ginbey, this is a team that is still in decay
Ginbey, their best midfielder for half of the game against the Crows, was the first player the Eagles picked at last year’s draft. Elijah Hewett, who had kicked a critical last quarter goal against Port Adelaide the previous week, was their second pick. Campbell Chesser is in his second season but missed all of his first. He missed most of his draft year and almost all of the year before that as well.
This is not 2018.
The experienced core of this team is, if anything, past its peak. Even the club’s best youngster Oscar Allen is coming off a year off. Ginbey could scarcely have done more to seal a round one berth than his first half performances on Friday night but even his performance was a reminder, in its own way, of what this season is likely to be about for West Coast.
If you are the Eagles you will, like every other club, pick your best team in Round 1. People screaming for rebuilds will call for more kids but Round 1 has to be your best team, otherwise you are sending the message to your fans in the first game that you have already given up.
But the Eagles are going to have to be ready to change gears very quickly on this season if they don’t start well.
Round 1 against North Melbourne away looks winnable. So does Round 2 at home against GWS. Then it gets tougher with 2022 finalists Fremantle, Melbourne and Geelong to follow.
It is going to get tough very quickly if the Eagles can’t manage at least one win from those first two games.
It is going to be tough from the outset if they don’t play better than they did on Friday night against Adelaide.
It was always going to be tough to know what to expect from West Coast this season. So much went wrong in so many different ways last year that while the ladder tells you exactly what sort of season they had – two wins, 17th, a percentage of 60, it is at best a guess to know what it meant for their list and their 2023 prospects.
But that also means that the Eagles might not know exactly what to expect from themselves. They are going to need to be flexible in their thinking and react quickly to early results.
The most disappointing aspect of Friday night’s effort against Adelaide was that the same issues that befuddled the Eagles in 2022 got them again.
Timid ball movement, shoddy execution, being clobbered around the contest, a lack of speed both on the attack and when defending.
It added up to a 59-point loss against the Crows, just as 10 of the Eagles' 20 losses had been by fifty points or more last year.
Except this was not the West Coast team that had been decimated by pre-season injury and ravaged by Covid. This was pretty much their Round 1 team, minus Naitanui and Darling, coming off what they believe to be the best pre-season they have done in five years.
A few established names we have come to know as automatic selections in the club’s best 22 have some proving to do in Rounds 1 and 2 – assuming they retain the faith of selectors heading into those games. Tim Kelly and Gaff had eight disposals between them at half-time on Friday night.
Ginbey, playing his first game against an opposition team at the age of 18, had had 13 disposals coming off the bench and finished with 17 disposals and 10 contested possessions.
He faded in the second half but he is the future. It is time for others like Gaff and Kelly to prove that they are still part of the present.