Melbourne coach Mark Neeld looked past his own team’s dire predicament to offer glowing praise of West Coast after the Eagles thrashed the Demons by a record 108 points in their clash at Patersons Stadium on Saturday.

The Eagles, preliminary finalists last year, demolished the embattled Demons with 78 inside-50s to Melbourne’s 32, winning 25.16 (166) to 9.4 (58) to cap a miserable week for coach and club.

Neeld said the result was evidence of the quality of West Coast’s performance and left no doubt the Eagles can challenge for the premiership this season.

“The Eagles are an outstanding footy side – they are very slick,” he said.

“Their ball movement – and we all know their defensive structure – we were very impressed with the Eagles.

“You watch their stoppage work and ball movement – it is precision.”

Neeld said the Demons couldn’t match the sustained intensity of the Eagles.

“Our challenge is to play high-intensity footy for longer,” he said.

“Having said that, the Eagles are very slick and we have got a young group, a new program and new game plan.

“The Eagles haven’t just clicked their fingers. They have been building that for a while.”

West Coast coach John Worsfold said the Eagles were reaping the rewards for improved midfield depth through the development of younger players, with best-afield Scott Selwood (34 touches and three goals) making the step from tagger to match breaker, Luke Shuey and Andrew Gaff continuing to improve and Chris Masten winning plenty of the ball against the Demons.

“That has been building,” he said of his team’s midfield riches.

“They are the same names that were there two or three years ago, other than Gaff.

“(Matt) Rosa is developing into a really seasoned topline player for us and Shuey, Masten, Scott Selwood were in the midfield three years ago as very young players.

“Players couldn’t see that talent we had in there, but we thought it would come through and it is starting to.”

He said the performance against the Demons was a significant improvement on their 49-point win over the Western Bulldogs in Round one.

However, Worsfold wouldn’t be drawn into suggesting the Eagles of 2012 were already a better side than the one that fell a game short of a grand final last year.

“I still think it is too early at this stage,” he said.

“We were a bit disappointed with some aspects of how we played last week, and we put it down to being Round one, but we knew there were areas we wanted to challenge ourselves to get better.

“It is probably a game that is hard to measure as we had that dominance of the ball inside our forward 50.

“We have got some challenges to come our way to see where we are really at in the coming weeks.”