Contest and clearances were the obvious areas of deficiency as the West Coast Eagles went down to Gold Coast by 37 points, coach Adam Simpson says.

Despite being efficient in attack and resilient enough to keep fighting in the last quarter when the scoreboard suggested the match was over, the Eagles were battling against a tide of Suns forays into their defensive 50 all game.

Led by hulking ruck Jarrod Witts, who had 10 clearances to go with 46 hit-outs, the Suns commanded the contested ball (+37) and stoppages (+17) at People First Stadium, where they remain undefeated in four games this year.

“There wasn’t much more to it than that. I spoke to the players that it was going to be an arm-wrestle around that area and we got beaten pretty heavily in the contested situation, around clearances in particular,” Simpson said post-match.

“That combined with some free-kicks and lost field position and we found it really difficult to get into the game.

“It was disappointing. We’ll look at it and it’s been something we’ve been pretty good at, but we’ll keep chasing the same things.

“The last quarter we said ‘let’s take it on and see what we can do’ and that last 15 or 20 minutes of resilience was all I needed to see to suggest we’ve got some spirit there, but we’ve got a heap of work to do, around the contest was not up to scratch.”

Eagles started fast with the opening three goals and won the opening term, but the tide of inside 50s (67-35 against) was telling.

“It feels like we left too much up to too few today and their good players played really well around that (contested) area,” Simpson said.

“We’ll see how we go next week.”

Pleasingly, Liam Ryan got through his first game in more than a year after two significant hamstring surgeries and Jake Waterman continued his stellar goalkicking form with four majors to sit third in the Coleman Medal race.

Skipper Liam Duggan, plus stars Jeremy McGovern and Elliot Yeo battled hard all day, but West Coast was outmuscled where it counted.

With a six-day break to contend with, the Eagles should be bolstered by the availability of Tom Barrass (suspension), Harley Reid (managed) and Noah Long (hip) for Saturday night’s home clash with Essendon.

“They’re all available this week, I think, so that’s a conversation we can have and hopefully we didn’t get any injuries today,” Simpson said.

“We’ll keep it a pretty steady week and we’ll hit Essendon as hard as we can.”