West Coast's much talked-about team defence will get a strong going-over against Fremantle on Sunday.
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The Eagles opted to recall Jamie Bennell to face the Dockers, as a replacement for Jeremy McGovern, who will miss at least three weeks with a hamstring injury, rather than opting for the taller Tom Barrass.
But veteran Sam Butler says who comes into the side is irrelevant.
"We're there to defend first – Gov's very good at what he does; obviously he is very good at marking the ball – and those intercept marks. It's hard to replace him exactly, but our mindset wont change at all basically," Butler said.
"We have a certain way we want to play – and we expect whoever comes into the side to play that way."
That way of playing, defending areas of the ground, has been looked at closely this season.
And whatever Simpson has bought into the game plan has worked.
When he took over, the Eagles came from a season (2013) ranked as the 14th best defence in the competition.
Last year that improved to the seventh best, keeping in mind that Darren Glass retired midway through the season.
This year, with Eric Mackenzie and Mitch Brown sidelined for the entire season, the improvement has continued and only Hawthorn and Fremantle have been more miserly.
The Dockers got a hold of the Eagles defence in round 3 of this season, kicking nine goals in the first quarter and 14 by half-time. The 17.9 (111) Fremantle kicked is the only score over 100 managed against West Coast this season. Five teams reached the century mark against them in 2014 and 11 in 2013.
But Butler says the Eagles are a much different team, even to the one that played against Fremantle earlier in the season.
"In the backline, we looked at a couple of clips and a bit of vision on how we played against them last time - how they like to set up. It's funny to look back then," he said.
"We were a different team back then. It's been a really interesting year. From that point on we changed a few things and developed very quickly. Over the next 10 weeks, we were slowly coming to the point where we wanted to be.
"In saying that, there's a long way to go for finals. We're not at the point we want to be yet.
"In the backline your main goal is to stop them scoring, so we defend a bit differently that we did before and then we just have some naturally flary guys, like Sharrod (Wellingham) and Shep (Brad Sheppard) back there, obviously Shannon Hurn is an elite ball user.
"All of our guys in the backline want the ball in their hands, we don't have too many fully locked down there – which is different to the past for sure."
