With the knives seemingly out for Alastair Clarkson after another listless North Melbourne defeat, former West Coast coach Adam Simpson revealed the fine line coaches must walk when trying to fire up players.

The Kangaroos were hammered in their Good Friday loss to Carlton, with Clarkson now boasting a 7-35 record since taking over at Arden Street in 2023.

It’s led to criticism across the football landscape, with some questioning whether Clarkson still has the magic that made him one of the most successful coaches of the AFL era at Hawthorn.

St Kilda great Nick Riewoldt urged Clarkson to rediscover the fire that marked his four-premiership reign at the Hawks.

“The noise is getting louder. If you’re gonna go down, Clarko, go down swinging. Bring back the punching holes in the wall of (the) coaches’ box — the way you did it when you were winning premierships at Hawthorn,” Riewoldt said on Channel 7’s The Agenda Setters.

But Simpson said that style could be hard to pull off in the modern age.

“It’s still a challenge, I thought you have six bullets you can use a year when you need to fire someone up,” Simpson said on Fox Footy.

“If you go hard at one particular player who wants the honesty in front of the group, as I did a couple of years ago, within an hour I got a phone call from the manager asking ‘what’s going on?’

“So there’s sensitivity around the players.”

Simpson endured heavy criticism towards the end of his tenure at West Coast as the Eagles fell to become one of the worst teams in history.

The premiership coach said it was impossible to block out the noise, saying finding the right balance was key.

“The last three or four years of my career as a coach it was really challenging, and you try and stay stoic,” Simpson said.

“But you get affected by it, and there’s a lot of pity. You don’t like pity, it’s not how we’re built.

“The criticism is sometimes justified and you have to own it and find the balance to not make it all about you, but taking the pressure as well.”