Mark Duffield - The Editorial (14.07.2026)

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**Mark Duffield** (0:46)
Hello everybody, and welcome to the SENWA Radio Studio. We're out here at Optus Stadium on this Tuesday morning in Perth. We're here thanks to Beaumont Homes. Award-winning design, built to be loved forever. It's going to be sunny in the city today, atop of 21 degrees. Exciting couple of weeks, I reckon, for the West Coast Eagles, and three of their gun young players as well. They get to test themselves against competition benchmark Brisbane at Optus Stadium this weekend. And then, of course, they have the freeman or dockers to follow that. It's amazing how quick the wheel turns in the AFL. So Andrew McWalter's team won one match last year.
The only other thing they won was the wooden spoon, and they finished four wins adrift of the next worst team, Richmond. Their brightest young star, Harley Reid, was accused of being undisciplined and having the second year blues. There were question marks over whether first year coach Andrew McWalter had progressed the team at all from where they were when his predecessor, the 2018 Premiership coach Adam Simpson, was deposed before the end of the 2024 season.
So a season on, and they have four wins. They have beaten North Melbourne and GWF, who remain in the race for the top 10 and a wild card birth. They've also beaten Port Adelaide and Essendon. They're two matches ahead of Richmond, three matches ahead of the hapless Essendon bombers, who appear doomed to the Spoon in 2026 Now, faced with the daunting prospect of playing against Collingwood in Scott Pendleby's record-breaking game at the MCG in front of 90,000 Magpie fans baying for Pendleby's glory and West Coast blood, the Eagles threatened to spoil the party for the Magpies. They took the seventh-place Western Bulldogs all the way to the wire at Marvel Stadium last weekend. They were beaten, not so much by a superior opponent, because for much of the match, it wasn't clear that the Bulldogs were superior. They were beaten only by a bit of stage fright in the big moments. A missed shot at goal or two here, a rushed decision there. Now, there are significant things to come out of this, and the first is the improvement of their individuals. Harley Reid has emerged from the second-year Blues to become one of the AFL's most imposing midfielders. He might have been beaten by Marcus Bontempelli last weekend in terms of influence on the contest, and let's remember Bontempelli is still arguably the king of all AFL midfielders. But the margin of defeat for Reid was narrow, and for a time, Reid looked capable of lifting the Eagles to a stunning win.
Reid is, I think, one of four young West Coast players who will lead the push back up the ladder, and three of those four will play over the next two weeks. Another is Reuben Jinby. He might be gone for the year with a significant quad injury, but he was probably leading the club's best and fairest when he was injured, and he will lead the defence when he returns.
A third is young midfielder Willem Dersma, who was the man allocated the role on Bontempelli at the weekend. And as good as Reid is, I wonder if, in four years time, we might consider Dersma as good or even better. He's not a brute like his friend and housemate, but he has a barely developed body that screams upside. He has acceleration, leaving traffic. He has a booming kick off both sides of his body, and he can take a pack mark. And he's done all of these things in big moments in games this season.
This is his first year in the AFL.
I don't know whether Dersma will win the AFL's Rising Star Award, but I suspect that he should. I know that Jagger Smith is very good, and Jagger Smith's Blues teammate Harry Dean is very admirable in holding down a tall defender's post in his first season in the AFL. But Dersma's range of roles and the way he is carrying them out screams future superstar. And the fourth player I think West Coast can look to to carry them up the table is Job Shanahan. Now, Shanahan ironically dropped a goal square mark at the weekend that would have gone some way to changing the outcome. He has one of the best pairs of hands in the AFL, and they just failed him in the moment at the weekend. What he does have though, is the ability to impact games even when not having his best day. And he's still a teenager. He hasn't yet turned 20 years of age. He has 35 goals from 26 games. He has 23 goals from 17 games this season. He has been goalless just four times. So this is a kid is only a little more physically developed than Dersma. And if I'm wondering who might be better in four years time, Dersma or Reid, I'm also wondering who in four years time West Coast will consider their most valuable player, Reid, Dersma, or Shanahan.