Paul Hasleby has warned - “Nobody should be safe at the West Coast Eagles”.
The Eagles are struggling again in 2023, sitting at the foot of the AFL ladder with one win from seven matches and a percentage of just 64.3.
Their latest performance was their worst of the campaign so far, kicking their lowest score of 2023 (44) on their way to a 108-point loss to Carlton at home.
Adam Simpson’s side has won just three of their last 33 games and the situation is now becoming dire, so much so that Fremantle great Hasleby believes the button must be pushed on a full rebuild.
“Strap yourselves in West Coast, more pain ahead,” Hasleby said on SEN WA’s The Run Home.
“We’ve been saying this for over a year, I think West Coast were late to the party. Whilst there are injuries, we accept that, there was always a softer underbelly in the development of their list.
“Once you start to expose more than 26, 27 players, they were vulnerable.
“Young kids will give you good effort for a period of time, but then there’ll be one game where they just don’t and we saw that on the weekend when they were blown off the park against Carlton.”
Hasleby feels nobody at the Eagles should be safe, from the CEO Trevor Nisbett down and says now is the time to invest in the club’s youth.
He also suggests that the tenure of premiership coach Adam Simpson could soon be up which lends further credence to the notion of a rebuild.
“Nobody should be safe at the West Coast Eagles, from the CEO to the coach to the footy boss to the list management group to the recruiters to the senior players,” he added.
“They need to take their medicine as a football club, make some changes, play the kids from this point on, embrace the draft.
“Because I hear this from West Coast all the time about their senior players that you’ve got to have senior players around the youngsters to help them learn. Well, it ain’t working so get youngsters in there, give them more exposure and play those kids because they still have a core bracket that are under the age of 30 that are clearly going to stay.
“But I would put all contracts on hold because you can’t guarantee me and I don’t think West Coast can guarantee us that they’ll have the same regime in place in six months or 12 months and somebody new coming in doesn’t want to be hamstrung by having all these players contracted where they might come in with a broom and go ‘bang, you’re out of here’.
“You’ve go to allow that flexibility if there is going to be change. If they continue like this, there has to be change.”
The Eagles travel to Melbourne this weekend to meet 16th-placed Richmond at the MCG as they chase their first win since Round 2.
They will have just 26 fit players to bring with them.