Greater midfield role the next step in Tom McCarthy’s rise amid impressive start to West Coast Eagles career

West Coast’s find of the year, Tom McCarthy, is not done yet in his debut season as he eyes more midfield minutes over the final two rounds.

McCarthy has cut his teeth at half-back across his first eight games, in which he has averaged an impressive 24.5 disposals, after being selected with pick No. 1 in the mid-season draft from VFL club Richmond.

But last Sunday he also attended 14 centre bounces on his way to a game-high 29 possessions, 627 metres gained, seven turnovers and four intercepts.

The 25-year-old mature age recruit admitted he is no stranger to on-ball duties, but playing against big AFL bodies was “next level”.

“I feel like I wasn’t ready for it at the start, but getting out there ... I definitely feel ready now and ready to move forward with it,” McCarthy said.

“It’s a massive jump and it’s probably the strength bit for me, I need to get a bit stronger.

“When you try and body up a few of the AFL mids, it’s a bit different, you have to go about your craft a bit differently, but it’s a great challenge.

“I’ll go in the pre-season, put on a bit more weight, hopefully be able to throw a bit more around next year... I think the speed of my game is great for the AFL level anyway. So feel comfortable there.”

When the Eagles suffered an 83-point defeat to Melbourne at Marvel Stadium in round 21, coach Andrew McQualter called for the team, and the club, to toughen up.

The Eagles delivered on that promise a week later, leading for large parts of the game against the Crows before being overrun in the last 10 minutes to lose by nine points to one of the premiership favourites.

It was an 18th versus 1st eye opener and McCarthy said the Eagles lived up to a vow to ramp up the pressure on a day they celebrated co-captain Liam Duggan’s 200th game and sent premiership pair Jeremy McGovern and Dom Sheed into retirement.

“As a group, we knew that we were pretty down on our defence the last two weeks, like probably not up to standard,” he said.

“So myself and the rest of the team took that as a challenge and made sure this week was the week that we really went after it and made that the standard moving forward.

“I feel like our intent and my intent as well, felt really good. And that’s probably why we got close to the Crows.”

The Eagles’ pressure rating was above 200 in the third quarter and hovered around that mark for most of the game.

“It was the highest that we had every quarter this year, and in that last quarter, I think our pressure rating was above two (hundred), which is really good and pretty rare to see. So when we’re all fatigued, I think that’s a really good sign.”

McCarthy said the coach was “pumped” in his post-match address, but the key now was to make it the standard rather than the exception.

“Because he made that a really big thing for us, and we made a commitment to him and commitment to Gov and Dom and Duggo to make sure that our intent was really strong.”

“We had an intent to perform for Gov and Dom, but now ... we’ve got to go back to our training and train the way we did last week.

“And despite not playing for a really high purpose, we’ve still got to go after what we did last week. And if we do that, we’ve got a baseline now that we can get to .. every week that comes with training hard and doing your reviews and stuff.

“It was just that last 10-minute patch of that last quarter (against the Crows). We sort of went away from our ball movement a bit, went into our shells a tiny bit, and that cost us at the end.

“We were disappointed with that last 10 minutes, but really happy with how the three quarters went before that.”

McCarthy said he had “heaps of growth left” from a player two years ago who would chow down on a sausage roll before a game to the elite athlete who now focuses on meditation in the lead up.

“I think from where I’ve grown to now is so far from where I was two years ago.

“But I reckon I’ve got that much more left to learn, both on the field and off the field, with diet and gym and even my footy, I know I’ve got lots of work on so really excited to where I can go.

“We do a bit of meditation and some breathing exercises before the game. A few of us boys get in there and do that and that’s something I never used to do, so it’s new to me, but I’ve started doing that since my debut.

“It really helps me to calm myself down before the game and getting rid of the nerves, and something I’ll probably do for the rest of my career.”