![\"West](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/1630ba8c623630a32fcd6cbd75d289d96ea713f0.jpg\")
Camera IconWest Coast coach Andrew McQualter. Credit: Graham Denholm\/Getty Images<\/p>\nWest Coast coach Andrew McQualter says his players have a choice to make \u2013 learn the lessons or give up.<\/p>\n
It comes on the back of the worst defeat of his short reign as the classy Western Bulldogs thumped the one-win Eagles by 94 points at Marvel Stadium on Sunday.<\/p>\n
The 19.12 (126) to 4.8 (32) defeat was their 21st of the season \u2013 a new club low \u2013 and their 32 by 10 goals or more in their past 90 games since the start of the 2022 season.<\/p>\n
Asked if the constant beltings would mentally the scare the younger players, McQualter pointed to ladder leaders Adelaide as to player can come from the lowest of lows to become premiership contenders.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou look back at teams over a long period of time and teams that have had seasons like this. And the Crows are a good example, right? Look at the Crows now, a lot of the players that are winning in the Crows\u2019 top of the ladder (team) they went through seasons like we\u2019ve gone through,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey had a couple more wins than we\u2019ve had but they\u2019ve had the smashings we\u2019ve had. It goes two ways. There\u2019s too many and it becomes overwhelming, and you can\u2019t handle it, or you build resilience.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd we\u2019ve got a choice to either learn our lessons from this time in our football club or to give up. That\u2019s the choice we have.\u201d<\/p>\n
McQualter said they wanted players who would learn the biggest lesson of all \u2013 how to win.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey\u2019re the types of players we need at our football club and we need to lean into that,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe need to spend the summer leaning into ways, competing and learning to win. And we\u2019re going to build that into our whole pre-season program.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re going to build competition into everything and we\u2019re going to start to learn how to win again, because it\u2019s lost at our football club at the moment, and we\u2019ve got to get the feeling back.\u201d<\/p>\n
The devastating loss to the Bulldogs comes only a week after arguably their best performance of the season when they took the Crows to the brink in a nine-point defeat.<\/p>\n
Bridging the gap between their best and their worst was their \u201cbiggest challenge\u201d, according to McQualter.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe biggest punish we had today was on the scoreboard all day. We just couldn\u2019t quite stop any of their scoring and we clearly couldn\u2019t score \u2013 pretty big parts of footy,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Camera IconWest Coast coach Andrew McQualter. Credit: Graham Denholm\/Getty Images<\/p>\n
\u201cYou look at the game and our pressure rating, which we chased today, that we\u2019re going after, it was actually a decent number today, quite high.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey were just so good at getting out and once they got out of that first phase of defence, they just punished us. Took the ball one end to the other too often, they were able to generate space.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey\u2019re stacked. They\u2019re one of the best teams in the competition and their numbers all year have shown that. And we got taught a lesson today.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe know the problems we\u2019ve got, and we know the challenges we\u2019ve got, and we know the work we\u2019ve got to do and it\u2019s going to take some time. But we\u2019re going to work.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"West Coast coach Andrew McQualter says his players have a choice to make \u2013 learn the lessons or…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":74897,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[560],"tags":[638,64,63,55,639,588,85,7067,698],"class_list":["post-74896","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-afl","tag-afl","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-australian-football-league","tag-australianfootballleague","tag-sport","tag-sports","tag-west-coast-eagles","tag-western-bulldogs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74896","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=74896"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74896\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/74897"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74896"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74896"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74896"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}