Round 3 WAFL Preview v West Perth

Swan Districts is back at home on Sunday afternoon to commemorate ANZAC Day and will be out to score their first win of the season up against reigning premiers West Perth.

While Swans have lost their first two matches of the 2023 WAFL season, the defeats to East Perth and East Fremantle have only come by a combined five points.

So the black-and-whites will be looking to open their account this Sunday afternoon when hosting West Perth at Steel Blue Oval in what has become an annual affair between the clubs to commemorate ANZAC Day.

The colts contest between the Swans and Falcons will begin the day at Steel Blue Oval at 8.40am with the reserves to follow at 11.10am before the league contest gets underway at 2.10pm.

Swan Districts and West Perth contests rarely disappoint and are generally difficult to predict, and this Sunday's match up at Steel Blue Oval is set up to be no different.

Swans are still hunting their first win of the season under new coach Andrew Pruyn, but the black-and-whites could just as easily be 2-0 after suffering a one-point loss to East Perth, and four-point defeat at the hands of East Fremantle.

The Falcons opened their premiership defence with a tough loss at home to Claremont but then hit back in the most emphatic fashion possible kicking 34 goals to hammer the hapless West Coast Eagles by 169 points last Saturday.

The Swan Districts-West Perth rivalry is right up there with one of the strongest in the WAFL competition over a period of about 15 years now, and that looks set to continue on Sunday with Swans hunting their first win of 2023 and the Falcons out to make it back-to-back victories.

West Perth has had the better overall of recent meetings with Swan Districts, but perhaps the best win Swans had in 2022 was in Round 19 last year at Steel Blue Oval by 12 points even though they went on to miss finals narrowly and the Falcons would ultimately win the premiership.

Prior to that and West Perth had won six straight against Swan Districts by an average of 24.2 points with the previous win by Swans coming back in Round 4, 2019.

Even going back beyond that and the Falcons had also won six of the past seven games with Swans.

So even though the majority of the games in the period have been tight and hotly contested affairs, West Perth has won 12 of the last 15 matches against Swan Districts dating back to 2015.