When the siren sounds at Adelaide Oval this weekend to signal the start of the clash between Port Adelaide and West Coast, the local fans will be settling into their seats for an early, but reasonable 12:00pm (ACDT) start.
But for the visiting Eagles, the reality is a bit different. Back in Perth, the clocks will read 9:30am (AWST).
It’s the earliest ‘body clock’ start a Western Australian team has ever faced, dating back to when the Eagles joined the competition in 1987. And although unique, it still might not be as out of the ordinary as you think; Fremantle had 10:15am and 10:30am matches back in 2021, while the Eagles will in just a few weeks’ time face Geelong at 10:30am for Gather Round.
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But 9:30am? Really? For most people on the weekend, that time might involve getting ready for a trip to the local supermarket, or maybe a first coffee of the day. But for Andrew McQualter’s side, it requires them to be at peak physical output as they hunt a second win in a row.
Despite the tough logistical hurdle, the messaging coming out of the club is clear: this is not a disaster, it’s just life as a team based in Western Australia.
“It’s not something we really use as an excuse,” West Coast high performance manager Phil Merriman told ESPN.
“It’s just reality. It’s just what it is. We don’t make any excuses for it.”
It’s a start time that would no doubt shock the systems of Victorian-based clubs and, probably, all 16 not in Perth. But Merriman, who spent five years previously at the Dockers, pointed out that the players’ internal clock is already somewhat calibrated for early starts.
During the summer months, the squad is often on the track early morning to beat the blistering heat, and on Thursday this week they’ll be training at 9:45am. So from a pure body clock point of view, it isn’t too drastic a change. The difference lies in the preparation.
Are the WA-based teams hard done by? ESPN/Getty Images
And those nuances Merriman refers to largely centre around fuelling the body. On a typical game day, a player has several hours to wake up, hydrate, and get two or three significant meals into their system. This Sunday, that window is cut basically in half.
“If we leave the players to go about it in their own way, they’ll probably wake up a little bit late,” Merriman explained. “What we need is for them to eat twice before the game to fuel their body, avoid cramping, and hydrate. With the young players especially, if they’re not clued onto it, they’ll eat once, go into the game, and not be fuelled correctly. That’s where we need to be really sharp.”
To mitigate this, the Eagles will implement a “mandatory walk” on Sunday morning, where players will be required to get out of bed by roughly 7:00am Perth time to get moving, get some sunlight, and of course, get to the breakfast table.
But the challenge is more than just what goes into the stomach. Merriman has also instructed his players to “open the blinds” the second they wake up to trigger a hormonal shift.
“That immediately releases cortisol in your body, which wakes you up quicker and gets the hormonal process started earlier in the day than normal,” he said.
The club has also begun an adjustment phase this week, with players encouraged to go to bed 15 minutes earlier each night and wake up 15 minutes earlier each morning to shift their rhythms.
Interestingly, the choice of which time zone to ‘live in’ for the trip is left to the players.
“I’ll get an idea of which players like to stay on Perth time and which players like to switch across to Adelaide time,” Merriman said. “Personally, I like it when we [stay on Perth time] because it helps us jump into the next week. Also, when you’re trying to get to sleep the night before a game and you’re on Perth time, it doesn’t seem as late as it is when you’re looking at the local clock.
“So there’s all those things, and the other side of it … some players will get to 16kms by midday, and that’s not normal,” he added. “It was in January because that’s what we were doing at training, but now that we’re in the routine of in-season, we’re only doing 7kms by 10:30am, so they need to be able to last throughout that three-hour period where you’re asking to get 16kms, and again, that rolls back to how we’ve fuelled them.”
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While the early start is the headline this week, it is merely one chapter in the much broader and deeper book of WA travel. Merriman admits there is “no doubt” that the constant flying takes a toll that other clubs may not face.
The data is striking. Merriman revealed that oxygen saturation in a player’s blood can drop from a sea-level average of 96% down to 90% during a flight.
“That immediately takes away the healing capabilities of your body. If we go to Melbourne and we have three players that develop a corkie, that corkie will take longer to recover because of the altitude. Let alone if there’s a hamstring. As you go into the following week, it’s harder.”
As if the 9:30am start time wasn’t enough, the Eagles must also prepare for environmental shifts, Perth’s dry heat vastly different from the humidity often found in the eastern states or the downpours you often experience in Melbourne.
“We don’t have much humidity over here. We get dry heat and wind. Going into our first game at the Gold Coast, we got our players into a sauna just to get used to it. Sometimes it might be p—ing down with rain in Melbourne when we haven’t seen rain in God knows how long in Perth!” Merriman noted with jest.
Ultimately, the Round 3 clash against the Power is a test of professionalism. The Eagles are a young group, and the club is focused on helping them build the routines that will sustain them for the next decade of their careers.
The 9:30am start is maybe an anomaly and undoubtedly a challenge, but in the four walls of West Coast, it is simply the price of doing business based in the west.
“This is what we do,” Merriman said. “And we need to try and do it as best we can.”
