Elliot Yeo is back to a pure midfield role after too much time spent plugging holes in the dyke in defence at the injury-ravaged West Coast Eagles over the past few years. This might have meant a lot of fantasy relevance given he is coming off a down season for him, given the joy he has given his owners over the year, but it's just too much of a stretch to trust his fitness over the course of a season. Questions remain over the hardness of grounds that the Eagles train and play on. Something must be causing this pandemic of soft tissue problems. Yeo's longevity is the problem.
Elliot Yeo is back to a pure midfield role after too much time spent plugging holes in the dyke in defence at the injury-ravaged West Coast Eagles over the past few years. This might have meant a lot of fantasy relevance given he is coming off a down season for him, given the joy he has given his owners over the year, but it's just too much of a stretch to trust his fitness over the course of a season. Questions remain over the hardness of grounds that the Eagles train and play on. Something must be causing this pandemic of soft tissue problems. Yeo's longevity is the problem.
Elliot Yeo returns to the senior West Coast side after over a year off, and the club has announced that his minutes will be heavily managed through the rest of the season as they ease him back into action still carrying a groin problem. With Nic Naitanui and whoever the second ruck is averaging 120% time on ground between them, the rest of the Eagles are going to have to stay on the park for longer. Ignore Yeo this year for fantasy, but lift your ratings for other West Coast mids, especially those with superior endurance like Andrew Gaff.
Elliot Yeo is riding high in a fair few individual awards this season, notably in the AFLCA coaches award. His background is as a defensive midfielder with occasional responsibility to tag one-on-one, but lately his personal output has been good enough to reconsider him as an attacking weapon as well. He is following somewhat in the footsteps of Elliot Yeo in his journey, and Yeo is one of a large number of decorated Eagle midfielders he won't be facing today as West Coast battles an injury list as long as your arm. Today is another day to show us his array of offensive talents.
Yeo has the mojo
Across the past three years, Elliot Yeo has delivered 24 possessions per game in midfield in a game style that started outside and has swung wildly towards the inside, with his mark rate halving and tackles doubling over that time. Despite that, he still has a disposal ratio slanted towards kicks and has become so damaging that he was tagged thrice during last season, twice being held to 16 touches. His humongous fantasy scores tend to come with double-figure tackle counts, of which he had six in 2019. Yeo is part of a West Coast midfield that doesn't have a lot of flexibility and is set up so that their midfielders don't have to rest forward, meaning that he can concentrate on one job for the entire game. When given this role he can pump through some massive scores, though he can also disappoint with sub-80s when things aren't going his way. Fantasy coaches who like a high scoring floor on their premium mids will leave him to others, but it's fun owning him when he's got the bit between the teeth.
No more Yeo-yo, it's Yeo-go!
Fantasy coaches knew perhaps better than anyone what Elliot Yeo's ceiling was if given a full season in midfield, and he duly delivered as one of the driving forces behind the West Coast flag last season. Despite losing two marks per game he more than made up for it with three extra tackles, ranking top five in that last stat plus for inside 50s while also on the edge of the top 10 for metres gained. The Eagles ran for most of the year with a bench filled with flankers instead of B-rotation midfielders, and much of the credit for that counter-intuitive system working has to come down to Yeo effectively working as hard as two players both inside and on the spread. He is relatively youthful for a midfielder with such a complete game, and his owners should expect four or five years more of this kind of production. Draft him early.
Elliot Yeo has been one of the success stories of the 2018 fantasy season, rewarding a middle-to-late-round pick in drafts with some very startable scoring patterns. He has enjoyed the increased responsibility that has come with his role replacing Matt Priddis and Sam Mitchell in the engine room, and while he hasn't replicated his three seasons averaging over a fantasy ton from his time at Brisbane, his scoring graph suggests 2019 might be his fourth at that level.
What Yeos up must come down
The pre-bye period of 2017 was the most consistent of Elliot Yeo's somewhat chequered career, with eight fantasy tons from 11 matches in a cleanup role starting at half back with 70% of his touches in the back half. He dropped 20 points in average in the second half though, tagging Patrick Dangerfield in round 13 and spending the next month doing jobs in midfield. His ratio skewed out to 15:8 despite 40% of his possessions being contested, with a top 20 ranking for metres gained. The signature Yeo play of the year was mopping up a wayward inside 50 at half back, turning on his heel and zipping away to deliver a long kick towards half forward. This role did wonders for his fantasy output, but there are no guarantees it will continue as the Eagles will be in transition following the Priddis era. He is unlikely to tag full time, with Mark Hutchings in that role, though the coach can sometimes instruct him to sacrifice his game for the team. He is worth an early pick, with some trepidation.
