Adam Simpson is West Coast’s second-longest serving coach behind only John Worsfold. IMAGE: AFL MEDIA.
The time has come for West Coast and coach Adam Simpson to part ways.
Well, actually, the time came last year, when the Eagles were regularly putting up performances that rivalled poor old Fitzroy in their last year in the competition.
But with two years still to run on Simpson’s healthy contract, West Coast’s top brass opted against terminating the premiership coach in 2023, despite an abysmal 3-20 record, a wooden spoon, an average losing margin of 64 points and five of the club’s 11 biggest losses, including their all-time low – a171-point defeat to Sydney.
No other coach in world sport would survive a record like that, or expect to survive it. After all, we keep hearing we are in a results-based industry. But Simpson made Houdini look like a Flinders Street busker when he managed to avoid the axe in a spectacular death-defying feat.
After showing some positive signs in the first half of this season, driven largely by the massive shot in the arm provided by teenage sensation Harley Reid, West Coast’s output has slid right back into the unacceptable nature of their previous two years.
So dire was the standard that the Eagles were playing at last year, that one of Simpson’s major aims in 2024 was to get his team back to at least a competitive AFL standard.
And to his credit, he’s been able to do that in about half of their games so far this year, most notably their wins against Fremantle, Melbourne and Richmond.
But the fact that restoring West Coast back to a team that resembles an AFL side is being viewed as an achievement is a red flag within itself.
Indeed, in the past three weeks, much of the optimism associated with the Eagles in 2024 has all but evaporated.
It was bad enough to be smashed by 99 points by Adelaide, a team that has basically no hope of featuring in the finals this year, and getting done at home by St Kilda, a team that notoriously struggles to score, was hardly a moment of glory either.
But the Eagles’ most recent result against North Melbourne should serve as the backbreaker for Simpson’s 11-year reign at the club.
The Kangaroos have been hands down the worst team this year as they lost their first 12 games by an average of 52 points. They are the league’s easybeats and are viewed by their opponents as nothing more than an opportunity for a percentage boost.
Yet on Saturday, at West Coast’s home ground, North were allowed to dominate proceedings for the vast majority of the match, and for the first time all season didn’t look like a VFL-type team.
So inept was the Eagles’ effort that North managed to kick eight goals in a row at one stage to open up a 33-point lead in the final quarter.
West Coast could only manage two goals to three-quarter time. TWO!
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And perhaps even more galling for Simpson’s men was the fact that after they wiped out their deficit and took the lead, North, which has minimal experience in being able to win games, let alone fight back once headed, managed to respond with the final two goals to seal a memorable upset win on the road.
It doesn’t get much more damning than that from a West Coast perspective.
And it’s not as if the Eagles fielded a team full of pups. Far from it. Their line-up on the weekend featured a healthy scaffolding of senior players such as Elliot Yeo, Jeremy McGovern, Jake Waterman, Tom Barrass, Jack Darling, Liam Ryan, Andrew Gaff, Jamie Cripps, Dom Sheed, Liam Duggan, Jack Petruccelle and Tom Cole.
There are more ways than one to say you don’t want to play for the coach anymore, and after routinely making that clear on the field last year, West Coast’s players couldn’t have been louder on Saturday that the club’s long overdue coaching change has to be made ASAP.
And if anything, the players have given the Eagles’ stubborn board the perfect excuse to finally pull the pin on Simpson. A loss at home to last-placed North Melbourne which won one of its previous 32 games? Absolutely inexcusable.
If a two-year payout was too much to stomach for them, then surely 1.5 years will be an easier pill to swallow. Especially for a club as cashed up as West Coast that basically prints money in its spare time.
And this is no slight on Simpson’s coaching ability, by the way. He will go down rightfully as a club legend who took the Eagles to two grand finals and one of the most memorable premierships in VFL/AFL history in 2018.
But as we see so often, the voice just becomes stale and both club and coach come to the end of the road as a result. There’s nothing wrong or shameful about that.
Ripping the band aid off now will also give the Eagles plenty of time to begin their search for Simpson’s successor with a caretaker in place for the second half of the season, rather than potentially sneakily going about it behind his back while he’s still in charge.
West Coast and Simpson should shake each other’s hand, thank each other for being so good for one another and amicably go their separate ways.
It should be a celebration of one of the club’s only three premiership coaches.
But it should be done imminently, because the longer the Simpson era drags on and these embarrassing results keep piling up, the more gloss will be taken off his significant contribution to West Coast, and the club should do everything in its power to prevent fan sentiment from unnecessarily turning sourer than it already is.
We don’t need a new coach.We need to only play players that perform to thir pay packets.Get rid of all senior players other than Yeo and McGovern and Waterman.Time to give the young recruits more game play.Two more years of experience required. EAGLES FOREVER
If you can’t acknowledge and accept the issues the Eagles had over the past couple of years or the fact that it was inevitably going to affect them on the field, you’re either lying or your ignorant. A year of unprecedented personnel issues due to covid and Injuries was always going to have a knock on effect for the next year. Add not having a genuine ruck and you can see why the top brass didn’t blame the coach for something that was very clearly not his fault
Every team has a game where they miss the goals and that was the north game for the Eagles, if it was anything other than the team suffering the yips for a week you may have had a point there. Unfortunately, like a lot of your article you don’t have a reasonable position and you apparently have enough experience with football to know better.
You either have a personal dislike for Simpson or you have little to no understanding about the issues the footy club has been through over the past few years. Either way, rubbish article.
A very good and well explained reply. We are always being “got at” by the critics, but never seem to understand the long term affects that come to most of the AFL teams.
We have been there before and will rise again.
There comes a time when the excuses need to stop. As pointed out in the article there was a significant core of senior players on the field last weekend that should have seen NM off in a heartbeat. They should not have to rely on the presence of a nineteen year old rookie to win a a game at home against the winless bottom side.