A BEAMING Ross Lyon has praised his team's leadership in the wake of a bruising derby win that might leave Fremantle without captain Matthew Pavlich and defender Clancee Pearce for Sunday's game against Richmond.
Flanked by Ross Glendinning Medal winner Michael Barlow, Lyon said he had not seen the bump Pavlich laid on Mitch Brown, which resulted in the Freo captain being reported for rough conduct.
But he said Pearce, who was concussed in an incident involving Eagles veteran Andrew Embley, had been speaking after the game and would be assessed during the week.
Lyon said the entire team had contributed to the victory.
"At times like this as a coach, it's really a players' moment. I certainly represent the club, but all we did was put them in positions and they got to work," he said.
"From my perspective (I'm) proud of the leadership and the players' effort. In a derby, it's really critical that you play it out and we did that.
"But the sobering thought is we (now) get a Richmond (side) that's gunning for us on their home turf and we (have) got to fly interstate. So we've got to recuperate, review and move on really quickly."
Barlow, who polled five votes to win the medal from Nathan Fyfe and Chris Mayne on three votes apiece, said Fremantle had been outworked by West Coast at times.
But Lyon said West Coast had laid so many tackles because Fremantle was winning so much of the contested ball.
"I thought we were winning the ball very well and we encouraged them to tackle us with a bit of overuse of handball," he said.
"To (West Coast's) credit, they brought that effort… But, I think fundamentally we were winning the ball really, really strongly.
"And then (we) probably just overused the hands a bit to encourage those tackling numbers, but, again, the players fixed that part after half-time."
Lyon said Aaron Sandilands had improved on his return to football last week, while Barlow said it had been fantastic to have the league's tallest player to compete against Dean Cox and Nic Naitanui.
"We are going to see hopefully the best of him, or the better part of his game, as the season gets toward rounds 21, 22," he said.
"It's like a good horse, he'll probably be better third or fourth up, I reckon, after a good month of training and games."
