JOHN Worsfold didn't earn his reputation as a rugged, never-give-in player without good reason, so it was more than a little bit surprising to hear him essentially hoist the white flag on his team's season on Saturday night.

We're just six games into a 22-round season. But the top four? Out of reach, says West Coast's coach, "no doubt about that". Top eight, then? "Unlikely". Excuse me? You have 16 games to retrieve a two-game deficit and you're giving up? Is this really the same club that gritted its teeth and battled through all that adversity, both on and off the field, last year?

In the next breath, Worsfold says his club is going to win a premiership in the near future. So what's 2008, then. A rest year?

Just why are the Eagles' brains trust taking the easy way out and attempting to condition their fans and the rest of us, who expected so much more this season, to ritual defeat only half-a-dozen games after losing a final in extra-time? Frankly, it's piss-weak, and letting both themselves, and their playing group, off the hook.

Here's a team that lost a grand final by a kick, won the next one, and, but for a few seconds, might have been playing off for another spot in the grand final last season. Now we're supposed to suddenly cop the prospect of the same side battling it out for a wooden spoon like some natural, cyclical thing? Pretty short cycle.

Five straight defeats, three of them by 10 goals or more, and a miserable 15th spot on the ladder, suggest a team full of raw, young kids with fragile confidence still on L plates. But there were 13 premiership Eagles in Saturday night's 22, and another three in Matt Rosa, Brent Staker and Shannon Hurn, who had played 170 games between them.

Yes, West Coast has lost Chris Judd and Ben Cousins. But the latter played just a quarter of the season last year, and Judd at least half of 2007 on one leg, and that didn't stop the Eagles missing out on second spot on the ladder only on percentage.

Whether legitimately or not, the fact that stopping Daniel Kerr has become the difference between West Coast winning or losing is an indictment on some of the battered little man's senior colleagues.

What on Earth has happened to Andrew Embley, a Norm Smith medallist who should be stepping up to the plate even more now, but whose 24 disposals against the Bulldogs were remarkable more for their lack of impact?

Why doesn't Adam Hunter exert the same influence or present the same threat with his flexibility as he did? Are Michael Braun and Tyson Stenglein just seeing out time? Why hasn't Quinten Lynch done more than flit in and out of the contest when his team desperately needs an imposing presence up forward? And why did it have to fall to the likes of the raw Josh Kennedy, Chad Jones and Ben McKinley to keep the fires burning on Saturday night?

There's still plenty of talent and heaps of experience on the West Coast list, with 10 100-games-plus players. But don't try the getting-too-old line. In list terms, only Carlton is younger than the Eagles. It should be the perfect balance for a continued tilt at the top of the ladder. Certainly not a spell on the bottom.

What has been revealed is a lack of flexibility, a lack of alternative game styles, and perhaps a lack of inventiveness on the part of West Coast's coaching crew. Plenty of good teams cop injuries and setbacks and make do with what they have without having their spirit broken.

That's how the Eagles appear at the moment. Nowhere more so than in the coaching box. Worsfold said on Saturday night that his players were relishing the huge challenge that lay before them. So why isn't he?

West Coast plays Carlton at home on Friday night before the first of this season's breaks. It's possible it could head to that little sabbatical just one game out of the eight.

But in an age where self-belief is supposedly all, why on Earth should the Eagles be expected to steel themselves for the fight if it doesn't appear their mentors can be bothered doing the same?

Time for the ball winners to be protected

FORMER Carlton champion Greg Williams would have had a wry smile listening to the debate about the scragging tactics applied to Daniel Kerr on Saturday night.

The Brownlow medallist was routinely blocked, held, hit, in fact little short of knifed in the weekly attempt to curb his match-winning brilliance.

Diesel never exactly shrugged it off, more managed to restrain himself — at least most of the time — from completely losing the plot.

Kerr didn't completely either against the Western Bulldogs, though his "Liverpool kiss" on Scott West came reasonably close. But while the Eagle champion hasn't really got much of a case playing the provocation card this week given that the incident came only 10 minutes into the match, it appears that among all the changes in the AFL in recent times some important issues haven't moved far at all.

John Worsfold made a fair point after Saturday's game about the lack of protection afforded midfielders. One that perhaps carries even more weight now than in Williams' day given how sanitised the modern game has become in other parts of the ground.

Of course, when they can see where the ball's headed, it's easier for umpires to spot the tug on a jumper or the hands in the back during a contest between a forward and defender, than pick up interference to an on-baller most likely immersed in a throng of bodies all diving on the ball, or cluttered around waiting for it to come out. But that doesn't mean we should just accept it.

One of the reasons the hands-in- the-back interpretation has upset so many football fans is because the contact made often appears purely incidental to the result of the one-on-one contest in question. You can't argue that when a player has his path to the contest impeded by an opponent who might even have his back turned to the play.

Every team's best ball-winners cop the treatment. And all of them have other players who dish it out, so this isn't about team A having an unfair advantage over team B.

But if AFL football really is a sport that prides itself on the "red-hot go", then this should be an issue addressed constantly, because the stars of the game not being allowed to play to their merits certainly undermines the fair-go ethos. Do we really want players whose greatest asset is their ability to harass and frustrate an opponent valued as much as those who can win the ball and use it with skill and precision? Damned if I do.

The AFL Laws of the Game committee does plenty of debating, and has done in recent years not just a little tinkering with some basic planks of the game. But there can't be any more basic than two players' being able to fight for possession from the same starting line, not, in the case of Kerr and a legion of other stars, after having first extracted themselves from a human version of smash-up-derby.

Take your hands-in-the-back rule. Take your interchange limits. This one mightn't be as easy to deal with, but it's a lot more important.

Draws can be celebrated, too

THERE were plenty of us cynics dreading the scores being left tied at the end of yesterday's North Melbourne-Sydney game. Not for any sense of unfulfilment. Just the knowledge that we were going to be listening to the same tiresome question again. Yes, that one.

Extra time? No. Nyet. Nein. Non. Or how about "get lost". Seriously, are we that ill-prepared to cope with just a little grey in a world of black-and-whites that even a sporting contest has to have a definitive winner and loser?

Yesterday's game wasn't one for the ages, but the climax was completely gripping. So there was a sense of numbness and eerie quiet for seconds after the final siren. So we didn't get to hear a cheesy theme song over the PA. So what?

An AFL season is a six-month journey. There's 176 games to be played. And probably 174 of them will end the same way, one team celebrating, the other dejected. Can't we savour the couple where the denouement is of a different hue?

If anything, the past two weekends have shown us that even results where the scores are locked together can take on a completely different complexion.

When the Western Bulldogs came from nowhere to snatch two match points against Richmond the previous Sunday, Doggie fans went up like a famous victory had been won, the Tiger army temporarily devastated. There was little doubt Richmond was stiff, its opponent somewhat fortunate.

Yesterday, in contrast, few would have argued that this was anything but a very just result, either side at some stage having looked dominant, either, at another, having to claw back a situation looking perilous.

To say supporters were left short-changed because neither team could register one more behind is patronising and treating them with contempt, as though they would gladly trade in the action of the previous four quarters for five minutes where one team scored more than another.

And to suggest it was all for nothing is also ridiculous. As Sydney coach Paul Roos pointed out later, those two points could function just as well as four when teams are scrapping for a finals berth a few months from now.

Surely one of the great things about football is its unpredictability, the knowledge that sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, and that sometimes it's neither. The latter has been the case the past two Sundays at Telstra Dome, and it's been breath-taking stuff. Now, if only we could do something about the tediously inevitable aftermath.

Of course, that would still leave us with another "gripping instalment" in the now seemingly weekly debate about four goal umpires, video cameras in the goal posts and, who knows, a football version of cricket's Hawk-Eye. Please spare us Tony Greig delivering the verdict.