A staunch Andrew McQualter has defended West Coast’s leadership meeting, saying any club in their situation not having high-level talks was “being negligent”.

The Eagles have been in the spotlight this week after it was revealed they had a robust meeting between players and the football department prior to their clash against Essendon.

Football boss John Worsfold called the meeting, as revealed by The West Australian, where several topics were discussed after a winless start to the season.

Eagles coach McQualter said they were not hiding the fact they had the meeting to ensure the club got better.

“I want to speak to our members on this topic because it’s been blown up the last couple of days… we haven’t kept this as a secret,” he said.

“Any organisation that is underperforming that doesn’t get their most influential people in a room to try to figure it out is being negligent.

“We had a real purpose to get our senior players, our senior figures of our football department together to find a solution to the way out of where we’re at. We’re not happy with where we’re at.

“It was a super productive meeting, everything was on the table and there has been some growth in us, our game and our environment and we’re going to continue to do it. We’re going to have meetings like that again with the sole purpose of getting better.

“We’re aligned with our senior players, that’s what came out of the meeting. We provided a great forum to put everything out there about what we’re trying to do as a club and every person that walked out of there had intention to make us better.”

McQualter confirmed the football department called the meeting and he felt fully supported in his role.

“We called it, we wanted the players to get together. We thought the most influential people in our team, it’s not fair to expect the young players to move the needle,” he said.

“The senior players group is the core of any football team and club so we tried to get as many as we could in the same room and work to improve.”

Eagles captain Liam Duggan said they had already reaped the benefits of the meeting.

“We got together to iron a few things out. It’s been talked about as an intervention or a crisis meeting, it wasn’t really that ... it was a robust conversation but we’ve already seen some improvement on and off field from it,” Duggan told Triple M Perth.

“It was more an alignment to reach what we’re going after and I think we’ve got some really great results from it.”

“It didn’t get heated, it got honest which is great... both ways for sure and that in itself is exactly what we needed. There was no anger towards club or players or whatever it was, but it was everyone in the room and if you wanted to have your voice heard you were heard.”

Duggan said he “fully believed” in the direction of the club despite the winless start to the season under new coach Andrew McQualter.

“I can see everyone working and trying their hardest to turn this around and it’s easy I think for people to look at us and see the wins and losses and think there’s nothing, there’s no leadership ... probably rightly so because that’s what they see the weekend, they see the two hours on the weekend,” he said.

“For everyone inside our footy club, I feel for them because they are putting in the work and they’re trying their hardest and sometimes when you’re in this position you can try almost overs and you cook yourself a little bit.

“I fully believe, that’s why I signed that contract a year ago to hang around, I want to captain the footy club, I want to help lead. I want to be there for when things turn around, I want to be a little part of that journey.”

McQualter is yet to taste victory as the coach of the Eagles as they prepare to take on Melbourne at Optus Stadium on Saturday in the worst start to a season in club history.

But the former Richmond caretaker coach said he knew what to expect when he took on the job of the difficult rebuild.

“AFL footy is incredibly hard and we’re in a position where we’re not where we want to be,” McQualter said.

“We want to win games of AFL football, we want to be competing in finals but it was always going to be difficult and it will be difficult still going forward.

“That’s the beauty of it, I love that challenge. We spoke about it as a group, this is where you want to gel together as a unit, as a team, as a department, as a football club to dig our way out of here.”