West Coast co-captain Charlie Thomas is confident her teammates will all heed the lessons from Saturday’s elimination final loss to Carlton and use them as motivation to improve during the off-season.
The Eagles lost by 41 points at IKON Park as Carlton’s experienced players stepped up on the finals stage.
Thomas said coach Daisy Pearce’s repeated messages about what is required to be successful would now hold more weight after experiencing how hard it is to win a final.
“Now that we’ve had a taste of it, we know what it’s like and we know what it takes,” Thomas told The West Australian.
“Carlton played a really good brand of footy. We know what it takes now and will go to work. It’s not going to fall in our laps. We never thought it would, but we’ll go to work in the pre-season.
“They piled it on early in that third and made it hard to come back. We need to do more work on our fundamentals, more strength in the gym and more running so it all pays off.
“The weather played into it. They played really well in the wet weather and knew how to scrap it forward. We’ll look to work through that.”
West Coast improved dramatically throughout their second season under Pearce. While the club has had to be patient since entering the competition in 2020, Thomas said a large group of the young list have only experienced the growth of the team under Pearce.
She said there is now an expectation that the team will constantly improve and a strong belief they will become a consistent finals team every year.
“There’s only a handful of girls who had played finals up to this point,” she said.
“Now we have 21 who have played and some of our young girls have never experienced playing in finals. So we’re all going to be better off.
“It’s pretty disappointing to finish off the season like that but there’s plenty of positives to take form our whole journey. We’ll review it and look to go again next year.”
Pearce has already identified key areas for improvement.
She said it was important to keep building the team’s midfield so they can match the best teams in the competition.
“We’ll keep growing in that space,” Pearce said.
“Courtney Rowley’s ability to find the footy and be that distributor in there has been missed. That’s left a gap in our midfield. I thought at times Swanny has come in and played that role really well. There’s been opportunities throughout the year to inject Rentsch in that space. We’ll just keep working on their craft and I’m sure they’ll improve.”
Pearce hopes the disappointment of the loss will soon turn into pride in the way they played throughout the season.
She doesn’t believe the emotional build up that saw them lose to Carlton last week and experience the devastation of thinking they’d missed the eight, then have the incredible high of qualifying for finals after Sydney’s loss to Essendon had any impact on the finals performance.
