To me the rise of West Coast reminds me that the gap between near the top and near the bottom is not as big as many think . Year after year the media and supporters think that the best you can hope for is incremental improvement and the worst is a small drop . Its not true . Sometimes clubs climb quickly and fall quickly . Whilst the rise of West Coast was not predicted by many neither was the big fall of the bulldogs .
IMO right now we have a group of teams who finished 6th to 14th who are not that far apart . Sydney , St.Kilda , Essendon, North , Bulldogs , Melbourne , Fremantle , Richmond and Adelaide and I would be even tempted to put Brisbane close to that group as well , would all have hopes for 2012 . If any of these teams recruit well , have success with first year players and have a good run with injuries they would expect to play finals in 2012 . Where some of them are better placed than others is the scope for improvement in 19-22 year olds on the list , we are one of those .
This year we had break out seasons for Vickery , Rance and Nahas . If say Astbury , Griffiths and Conca mirrored that next year I think many would be surprised at how good we could be in 2012 , maybe not to WCE levels but finals . However if we had a bad run with injuries and these players stagnated we could finish bottom 4 . That's why I don't subscribe to the theories about how far we are from finals . We lack depth of quality but our best 22 is not far off finals quality .
