West Coast star Elliot Yeo and youngster Elijah Hewett will undergo scans to determine the extent of their injuries as the club works through a challenging phase leading into this weekend’s AFL and WAFL matches.
Yeo was unable to play out the final stages of Sunday’s loss to Geelong due to a groin issue, while Hewett (ankle) went down in the opening seconds of the WAFL Eagles’ heavy defeat against West Perth.
“Yeoy moved into the midfield and he provided some real energy and spark in there,” General Manager – Football Gavin Bell said today. “Unfortunately, it looks like he’s injured his groin.
“We’ll know more information in the next couple of days, we’ll get some scans done on that and the medical team will get to work.
“Elijah, first centre bounce basically, slipped over and did his ankle. He didn’t take any further part in the game, which left us low on numbers.
“We also lost another WAFL player in the first couple of minutes, Harry Creasey, as well so our WAFL team was down to 20 players early in the game, which made it really difficult.
“With Elijah, he’s gone off and had some x-rays. We’ll get further scans and further advice on the best progression forward for Elijah.”
Yeo and Hewett’s injuries compounded a difficult period for the Eagles, who also added Harry Edwards (fractured wrist), Isiah Winder (knee) and Tom Cole (ankle) to an already long injury list last week.
Experienced players Jeremy McGovern (hamstring), Jamie Cripps (ankle), Liam Ryan (hamstring) and Nic Naitanui (Achilles) are facing mid-to-long-term stints on the sidelines, while Campbell Chesser (knee), Dom Sheed (throat) and Jack Williams (spleen) are unavailable.
In better news, skipper Luke Shuey (hamstring) and young ruck Callum Jamieson (ankle) are pushing to return this weekend.
“We’re in a challenging phase. We have got a long injury list. Probably eight to nine of those are collision-based injuries and then unfortunately the ripple effect of getting collision injuries in-game and at training is more work gets put on others,” Bell said.
“Unfortunately, the injury list is growing and we’re somewhere between 15 to 17 players that may be unavailable this week.
“We need to work our way through to pick the best possible side that we can and give ourselves the chance to beat Port Adelaide this weekend.”
Coming off three practice match wins in pre-season, the WAFL Eagles have felt the brunt of West Coast’s availability issues in recent weeks.
“The way the fixture fell is both teams ended up playing last year’s premiers – Geelong and then West Perth in the WAFL,” Bell said.
“Of our six guys that played, two of them are 18-year-olds, three were 19-year-olds and one was 20, so they were the youth of our list playing in that team.
“Losing two players early just put a lot of pressure and strain on the 20 that were able to play.
“It’s going to be an ongoing challenge for us as they are greatly affected by our AFL player availability and the concessions that are made for us as a group it makes it difficult when we strike the adversity that we’re in at the moment.
“The WAFL program is all about helping prepare our younger guys and those guys returning from injury or out of form, getting them ready to play AFL football again.
“We saw in the pre-season that we were highly competitive and won games in that phase when we had really good player availability at that level.
“As soon as that aspect changed for us it puts a lot of pressure on our WAFL-listed players and our kids.
“We understand what’s happening at the WAFL level. We don’t like losing like we did but we also have full context of what’s going on.
“Rob (Wiley) and Steve (Trewhella) and all the guys involved in our WAFL program have our full support, because it’s something that we really value and we want to make sure we’re a highly-competitive team.”
