Source :- PERTH NOW NEWS
West Coast have won two on the trot already doubling their 2025 win total. And while West Coast’s two-point win might not look like much on paper, context matters. It came at Adelaide Oval, where they’d lost their last 10, against Port, who are always hard to beat at home.
For a team that has spent the past few years at the bottom of the ladder, away games like this you normally pencil in as losses, which is why this win felt different
After a slow start, it would have been easy for West Coast to fall into old habits and give up – we’ve seen that version of the Eagles for a majority of the last six years.
But this time they stayed in the fight. They didn’t panic, they didn’t abandon what they were doing, and when the game was there to be won late, they trusted themselves and their game plan and found a way to get it done.
That ability to grind out a result when things aren’t going your way is a skill in itself. It’s not something you can just flick on overnight, and it’s often the difference between sides that sit in the middle of the ladder and those that have sustained success as a team.
Watching the Eagles over the past couple of weeks, there’s been a shift. It’s subtle, but it’s there.
They look like they believe they can win again, and belief sits right at the core of what people mean when they talk about a “winning culture”.
It’s easy to reduce the phrase “winning culture” to just effort or attitude, but it’s more layered than that. Yes, you need talent, and yes, you need a coach with a clear game plan. But just as importantly, that game plan has to suit the players you’ve got.
The best coaches don’t force players into roles they can’t execute; they build a system around strengths and give players something they can trust with processes they can handle.
When players have a process in place to implement, and trust what they’re doing, they commit fully. When they commit fully, confidence grows. And when confidence grows, you start to see teams win games they might not have won before.
Collingwood have been the best example of that in recent years. They’ve made a habit of winning close games because they’ve done it before, and believe they will through their processes they all trust.
West Coast aren’t at that level, but the last two weeks suggest they’ve bottomed out and the must needed mental change has begun.
I’ve been part of teams where that shift happened. In my 2014 Hockey World Cup with the Hockeyroos, we put together a run to the final off the back of multiple tight, hard-fought wins.
After the first win, you’re just relieved to get over the line and think you got away with one. Then you do it again, and you start to think there might be something in it. After you do it enough times, it becomes a mindset and you go into those moments knowing you can win rather than hoping to. Hard fought wins like this are building blocks to better things. You stack them on top of each out and suddenly you’ve built the foundation of something great. Once that foundation is build you can find more and more gears. You can try new things and take the game on as individuals and as a team, knowing you have a fall back in place – the ability to grind out a hard fought, and sometimes ugly, win.
That’s what a young West Coast side are starting to find out. Much like a losing culture (one like the current Carlton crop are experience) is contagious and becomes a habit, a winning culture is too. It doesn’t mean everything has turned around overnight.
But once a group starts to believe and that belief spreads, it can change the direction of a club quicker than most people expect.
