The bye cannot come quick enough for West Coast.
The Eagles have slumped to last place on the AFL ladder on the back of five consecutive losses, the last a thumping by 108 points at the hands of Carlton.
The club’s reserves side that plays in the WAFL had four AFL-listed players in it last week. And of the 10 players on the injury list that could be considered as being in their best 22, only Dom Sheed appears a chance to be back for the Round 8 clash against Richmond at the MCG.
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The Eagles will limp to their bye in Round 14, with games to play before then against Gold Coast, Hawthorn (in Tasmania), Essendon, Collingwood and Adelaide.
Asked post-match where the Eagles went from here, Dockers legend Matthew Pavlich told Fox Footy: “This is the unfortunate thing. They’ve got not a huge amount to go to in terms of their injury list, in terms of their list.
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“It’s a hard spot for them to be in right now.
“We know the troubles they’ve had over the last two seasons, just three of their past eight matches they’ve won.”
Eagles coach Adam Simpson said the challenge is to show the resilience they were able to show in games before the blow-out against Carlton.
“We can’t train it. We’ve got 26 training,” he said.
“It’s not an excuse. But we can’t do anything outside of the fundamentals. We’re working on our running.
“And we’ll keep doing that, because we won’t have much back next week.
“Mindset’s really important, so how we respond. And we’ve been dealing with this for a long time.
“So, we’ve just got to stay resilient, accept the criticism, understand individually and collectively we weren’t good enough tonight, and we got beaten by a side that was pretty hungry and ruthless.”
The numbers were ugly for the Eagles on Saturday night.
Carlton had 167 more possessions, 19 more tackles and took 80 more marks. The Blues were able to dominate the game through uncontested possession.
West Coast found ways to stop the bleeding of points in past weeks, but not against the Blues.
Simpson acknowledged that they got beaten across the ground.
“The weaknesses we had with personnel were exposed from very early on,” he said.
“We’ve been trying hard to compete around the contest and stoppages and contested possessions and ground balls, those things we value.
“We got exposed for most of the night. The biggest stat was probably contested marks. We couldn’t take one (two) and they took plenty (14) … There’s a bit of personnel with that, but it’s also not good enough.
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“We’ll get on with the next week as quick as we can.
“We can’t give them the confidence, all we can do is keep chasing the things we’ve been chasing all year, and hopefully we can perform better next week.”
The injuries kept coming for the Eagles too.
Samo Petrevski-Seton was subbed out of the game with a leg injury, while the young defender that replaced him, Rhett Bazzo, didn’t finish the game.
— NCA NewsWire
