Minutes after his side’s 122-point loss to Adelaide in June, West Coast coach Adam Simpson declared his club’s intentions at season’s end.
“We‘re going to transition the list pretty quickly, it’s going to be one of the youngest lists in the comp in a year or so,” Simpson told reporters at Adelaide Oval.
“We want to get some picks at the top end if we can.”
It was a brief yet blunt insight into how the Eagles will approach arguably their most important yet delicate off-season in their history.
Premiership captain and dual All-Australian defender Shannon Hurn on Tuesday announced he would retire at season’s end after a decorated 18-year career.
You sense Hurn was the first domino to fall, with his retirement set to spark several West Coast exits over the coming weeks.
West Coast is one of the AFL’s strongest and richest clubs. Yet its fans – like any supporter group – will struggle to tolerate many more seasons anchored to the bottom-end of the ladder.
Eagles fans have already endured the worst year since the club entered the AFL. Yet it’s come amid a peculiar list situation.
While the Eagles sit on the bottom of the ladder with a 2-17 record and a paltry percentage of 50.6, they still have the seventh-most experienced and 10th-oldest list in the competition.
Essentially, the Eagles haven’t ‘bottomed out’ yet – even though their on-field results this season should reflect a team that has bottomed out.
As dual All-Australian Kane Cornes has persistently pointed out, West Coast’s on-field woes have derived from an “arrogant” list management strategy, with the club handing out questionable long-term contract extensions to some players and trading out of three consecutive drafts.
Now the reality is West Coast must become young – and quickly.
Clubs like Sydney, Geelong, Hawthorn and Richmond in recent years have all attempted to renovate and rebuild on the run – that is bringing in some young players while retaining a core senior group and topping up with a few acquisitions via trade and/or free agency – while remaining in the premiership window. It worked for the Swans and Cats and fell flat for the Hawks, while the jury is still arguably out on the Tigers.
West Coast had a crack, too. But as evidenced by its past two seasons, it backfired spectacularly.
Yet you sense the Eagles can’t afford to head down the Hawthorn or North Melbourne route and cut ruthlessly hard, simply because the foundation of the list still isn’t there.
“The West Coast Eagles will evolve the list and bring in some top young talent. During that period, though, the older players still play such a significant role to make sure the younger players play at the right standards and they don’t get physically and mentally knocked around in this transition period,” triple premiership Lion Alastair Lynch told Fox Footy in June.
It means the Eagles will surely need to have a renovate-on-the-run attitude while being at the bottom-end of the ladder, purely because of the top-heavy nature of its list, both from a salary and experience viewpoint.
Simpson in June assured frustrated supporters his club had a clear plan to regenerate the playing list via upcoming national drafts. But rather than a ruthless cull this season, they’ll need to juggle a few list balls.
The Eagles are renowned for their loyalty to long-serving players and staff members. But considering the club’s plight, some brutal calls on veterans surely loom – as do some retention calls that’ll need to be justified to their fans.
THE VETERANS STATE OF PLAY
The Eagles, according to multiple reports, quietly committed to four-time All-Australian Jeremy McGovern earlier this year, with the 31-year-old star defender extending his contract by two years despite his luckless run with injury in recent seasons.
And it appears 31-year-old Jamie Cripps, who was also initially out of contract at season’s end, has re-signed with the club. His two-goal, 18-disposal, 11-tackle performance against North Melbourne on the weekend amid his injury-interrupted 2023 campaign justified why it’s worth him staying on.
Perhaps the most uncertainty surrounds captain Luke Shuey, who looms as a 50-50 proposition to play on in 2024.