Chewin' the Fat – Kris Miller column August 29

THE WAFL is a fantastic competition and it has obviously been around for a long time and it has changed a lot over the last 25 years with the AFL kicking in, but in terms of its position in the state as a feeding competition it is hugely important.

It is a competition that I don’t think anyone would let dwindle. People can say it's struggling here and there, and whilst the AFL is the strongest sport in Australia, the second-tier competitions will never dwindle out because even the AFL knows how important they are.

It is probably even more important for the blokes who won't get to play in the AFL. It gives them a chance to play in a competition where your commitment is the biggest factor in you succeeding or not. You don’t need that commitment in the country or amateurs. We have 40 or 50 blokes at training every night, we have good facilities, we have physios and trainers here every night and you wouldn’t get that anywhere else below the AFL except in the WAFL in Western Australia.

From a playing perspective, I see that the competition is in a really good position but I wouldn’t have a clue from an administration point of view how hard it is to tap into the corporate dollar. From a playing perspective and a spectator's point of view, I think the competition is as good as it's been for a fair while though.

Whether I'm slowing down or not I don’t know, but it definitely seems like the game in the WAFL is a lot faster now than what it was when I first started when blokes would sit on the bench for three quarters and then come on and play in the last quarter. Now you come on in the first five minutes if you start on the bench so the amount of rotations has helped to speed the game up quite a bit.

Another big change in my time has been that you just don’t have the same amounts of senior players sticking around the club than there was back then but I think that is a bit of a reflection on society as well. Young kids tend to want things easier and easier these days and they aren’t as prepared to work hard for things as we were brought up to do. Even the generation before me, they had a totally different attitude to things where they persisted until they couldn’t give anymore but now if things don’t happen for young blokes straight away a lot of them don’t stick it out.

That is probably part of the reason why you don’t have a heap of senior players hang around clubs these days. A lot of guys might stay for a couple of years and as soon as it gets a bit harder or they get dropped or something, and they just disappear and give up.

The most important thing at WAFL level to maintain the players at the club, and not let them walk away just because things get a bit hard. I think sometimes the players get undervalued and forgotten when they are actually the club's greatest asset. People think that there are a lot of other people and factors more important than players, but at the end of the day without players there'd be no club. A club would survive for a year without a coach, CEO or doctor but they wouldn’t survive without players. That can get lost in translation sometimes and the club that can maintain the most senior players will end up coming out on top eventually.

When it comes to your coach, the most important thing is the way they manage people at this level. You have to man manage 50 or 60 who all have different jobs and lives away from the club, but if you are able to do it you are a long way ahead of the game. It wouldn’t be an easy thing to do and you still are never going to please everyone, but if most players are enjoying being here and want to stay then I really think the rest takes care of itself. WAFL players need to have enormous commitment and dedication so if a coach can keep them happy, then he's done half his job. 

Without a doubt, John Dimmer is the best man manager as a coach I've played under and as a result he is the one I have had the most team success under as well. He really did keep things very simple but he also put a lot of trust in us senior players. If you had work commitments or couldn’t train for some reason, he would never question your commitment or anything like that and you get to a point where you just never want to do the wrong thing by him because of the trust he has put in you. No one wanted to let him down and that trust between him and his players was a big reason why he was so successful.

There is a lot of talk with the alignments next year that will come into play and I think they will have a fair impact on the competition, but it will come down to when you play a side and what sort of AFL players they have available. You might play Peel one week with all their Dockers players available so they will be a very good, but then another side might play them the next with no Fremantle players available and they could be a terribly weak side. In terms of that, it will have a big impact because you might play East Perth and Peel at full strength and another team might play them when they are weakened.

East Perth might be a bit different, but Peel will be very up and down dependant on their Dockers players. They could be very strong one week and very weak the next because I don’t think they will have the depth to be strong without their Fremantle players. If they can't have the depth there this year when it's not a full alignment, then next year is going to be a lot worse I would think.

The thing with East Perth back in the early 2000s, and I was at East Fremantle when we played them in the 2000 grand final when they won their first premiership, was that their strength was actually their senior players not the Eagles ones. They had Devan Perry, Rod Wheatley, Jeremy Barnard, David Swan, Ryan Turnbull and all those guys so that was their strength and then they had these young Eagles players who were top up to that. It was East Perth's core group who won them those flags and they also had some good young Eagles blokes to help out, but they had that stability of a core group so they didn’t rely on any AFL players to be their best players every week.

That's why I think East Perth will be better off than Peel next year if their senior guys like Johnson, Smith, Swan, Wulff, Seal and those types all play on. They will be a terribly difficult side to beat next year because they are a good side now this year and they only had two West Coast Eagles players against us on the weekend so they could have a side similar to the early 2000s if they were able to keep a lot of those senior players.

Off the field, things at the club have changed a lot over my career. Now there is a lot more emphasis on GPS and these sorts of things that weren’t available before. I wore one once and I blew it up, they weren’t able to actually get the data off it. I cooked it. Things like a GPS can't measure effort or commitment or desire or even your ability to find the footy, and there are more important things than how far you run. If you have that competitive desire, that will get you a lot further than winning a running race as such. There are a lot of fit people out there who wouldn’t be able to play good WAFL footy so all that sports science is nowhere near as important as people are making out.

By Kris Miller