West Coast coach Andrew McQualter has declared the Eagles are a better team than last year, but they still have a lot of growth in them for the second half of the season.

The Eagles’ past five weeks have been arguably their best since 2021, with the young side producing a brand that has fans and pundits buoyed about the direction of what has already been a lengthy and brutal rebuild.

Wins against Greater Western Sydney and Essendon have taken their season tally to four before the bye, while they were close to stealing victories against Collingwood (10 points) at the MCG, as well as Port Adelaide (six) and North Melbourne (one) in the past two weeks.

It is a far cry from the side that claimed only one victory in McQualter’s maiden season and 11 in 91 games from the start of the 2022 season to the end of 2025.

“In the first seven rounds, we had a few wins, but we weren’t quite playing the way we wanted to,” McQualter said after the tense defeat to the Kangaroos.

“Then I think really post round seven to whatever it is now, we’ve really built our game. There’s some strong evidence around time in the forward half, the type of team we want to be, better pressure on the ball, a better defensive team — there’s definitely some growth in that.

“We’re a better team than we were last year, and I think we’ve still got so much more room to grow, which is exciting. We’ve got a lot of individuals in the system that we can still get better.”

Former Richmond and Western Bulldogs forward Nathan Brown said the Eagles had developed a “defining game style” similar to that of flag fancies, based around forward handball.

“Sydney are doing it, Geelong have started to do it, and now I can see a pattern in the way West Coast have started. They lost the game but let’s have a look at their hands in tight to get them out of trouble,” Brown told The Sunday Footy Show.

“This is a midfield that’s now starting to build. I can see what West Coast are starting to do. Quick hands in and out, and as they get better and players get bigger, they will start to do this a lot better.

“A quick chain of handballs and they kick the goal. I haven’t seen this from West Coast last year or the last couple of years.

“You’re taught not to forward handball, but if you’re out, you may as well get that ball forward because what that does is it allows your forward to get to work. So well done by West Coast, they lost the game, but they’ve got a defining game style.”

West Coast will head into the bye ruing what could’ve been after successive close defeats to the Power and Kangaroos at Optus Stadium.

McQualter conceded they were yet to be able to do the necessary work on close game scenarios at training as they built the fundamentals which could’ve reversed the results.

“Ultimately, in our game, you get real belief from winning; that’s just what happens. But there’s enough going right in our game at the moment that we are building the belief internally,” he said.

“We’re playing the right way, we’re competitive, we’re giving ourselves a chance of winning every game.

“Because we’re so young, we’ve done some training around close game scenarios, but we have prioritised just building the rest of our game first. We weren’t in close game scenarios for a long period of time, so it’s a good problem to have, and we’ll keep working through that.”