WAFL: West Perth coach Bill Monaghan expecting Falcons to be at best

THE players have been fantastic all year.

Not only through the last four to six weeks when we’ve been in administration, and they’ve been able to separate off-field and on-field.

But what I said to them after the South game (the Bulldogs won the qualifying final last weekend 22.14-144 to 12.11-83) was that it was not a performance in line with what we’ve done all year from Round 1 to now.

Probably take out Round 2 when we got beaten by a bit by East Perth and then the Subi game four or five weeks ago, our season has been very good.

They’ve played at a high level, they’ve played as a team and they’ve played with some real passion. And that was clearly missing on the weekend

And in some ways we’re at a little bit of a loss to explain why that was the case.

But there is no point ramming that down the players’ throats. They need to understand that’s not a performance that anyone can be proud of.

And it’s not a performance that we want as a football team or club to be associated with.

So that was the message from me and there was no anger in it.

It was just ‘you deserve better, I know you’re better than that, good news is we’ve got a week to fix it’.

We need to focus on what we can do this week against Claremont and what we can control and that’s what we’ve been very good at all year.

There will be a response and I’m sure the players will put their best foot forward.

Whether that means we beat Claremont or not?

Claremont are a good side; they’re playing good footy. We’re going to have to be at our best and I’m expecting us to be at our best this weekend.

West Perth host Claremont in this Sunday’s WAFL first semi-final at Joondalup Arena at 2.15pm.