Chris Scott on… West Coast

They're going to have a much better team on paper than they've had all year and the players coming in a pretty daunting.

The obvious approach for us is to assume that they're going to be close to what they've been at their best and disregard what we've seen for the rest of the season.

We don't think that their recent history is going to reflect the way the game will be played on Saturday over in Perth.

So we'll need to go back a little bit further and have a look at what the trio of Barrass and McGovern and Hurn have done at their best. I don’t think they've played together all year.

It's a rare situation where we wouldn't generally play a team in the midpoint of the year and be looking at what they'd done at their best six months prior to that. But I think this is one situation where we've got to look at the more distant history for what to expect.

Chris Scott on… Sam Menegola

He's played one in the VFL and couldn't play last week because of the bye but he's done a really big block of training so we think he's ready to come back

He is one of those players that's in the category of having virtually put back-to-back pre-seasons together, he's been running for so long.

He's had a bit of an issue with that knee that prevented him from getting that last couple of percent to allow him to play, and our medical staff is really firm on waiting until they did get to that 100% stage where he could play which he is now.

Chris Scott on… Patrick Dangerfield

Patrick's obviously the one that garners a lot of attention, and we did forecast a long time ago that the training that we would like him to get in was arguably more important than his rehabilitation from his injury.

He's been training really well, we just don't feel that going to Perth this week justifies the interruption to his training for the preparation for what will be, I think, the last nine games of the season for him.

Chris Scott on… Second Half Expectations

In really simple terms you can't win the premiership in the first half of the year, but you can play yourself out of contention, so the excitement around the place is something that we shouldn't run away from and a bit of pressure comes with excitement as well.

It's in some ways an easy way to live your life when you're out of contention. You can go about your business without much pressure or without much expectation, but we want to be in the arena.

So that's all we've done to this point.

We've given ourselves a chance with a bit of a platform to have a good second half of the year and be in the conversation when finals come. We’ve got a bit of work to do to even get there so far, but in terms of the excitement around the place, yeah, we're embracing that.