Webb continues amazing start to coaching career

MARC Webb continued the impressive start to his coaching career leading Western Australia to its first win over Victoria since 1991 and he deserves much of the credit for some intuitive moves including playing Wayde Twomey forward, picking Clancy Wheeler and blooding some youngsters.

The former triple premiership captain and four-time premiership player at Subiaco led Claremont to last year’s WAFL premiership in his first season as a senior coach meaning he was offered the job to lead WA against Victoria in Northam, and he guided the Black Swans to a 17-point victory.

As a player Webb was part of some tough losses against Victoria most notably the 119-point hammering at Port Melbourne’s TEAC Oval in 2007 so he knows just how significant the result is for the WAFL.

“It’s just a massive result for the competition. We lost that game a few years ago and it was more the fact that you felt embarrassed for the fact that it was a reflection on the competition that you are a part of,” Webb said.

“I don’t think it was a true reflection at the time and these games do tend to reflect on where we are at and it’s just to show that we are comparable with other State leagues. Our focus is on always being competitive because we believe we have enough quality players in the WAFL to be able to say that.”

The day didn’t look likely to pan out well for Webb early on, though, when WA kicked inaccurately and Victoria assumed control to be 31 points up midway through the third quarter.

However, from there WA kicked nine of the last 10 goals to run out impressive winners and Webb always thought there would be a good chance of his team running over the top of the Big V.

“It was one of those things where early on we missed a fair few opportunities we should have taken and you never know if that will hurt you or not in the end. You just have to keep the boys positive on the process you are trying to achieve and we never really seemed out of it, but when we did get back into it they seemed to kick two quick ones,” he said.

“When the momentum changed in the third quarter, though, when they started to slow down and the pressure started to drop we got the feeling we could run over them and that definitely panned out.