IN THE wake of its disappointing loss to an injury-depleted Western Bulldogs outfit, St Kilda has once again thrown its support behind embattled coach Alan Richardson.
The Dogs piled on eight goals to nil in the third term, before running out 35-point winners, consigning St Kilda to its 14th loss of the season (already three more than they suffered in 2017) and turning the heat up on Richardson.
DOGS SAVAGE SAINTS Full match coverage and stats
But Saints football manager Simon Lethlean says Richardson is the right man to take the club forward and believes a new-look team of assistants will enable him to turn things around.
"I see enough in 'Richo', his long history in coaching, the way he educates our players, the way they play for him when they are doing what is asked of them. And I see the effort he puts in and the way he can lead people; I see that first-hand, so I know that he is the right man to lead this group that he's started off with," Lethlean told 3AW on Sunday.
"Richo's taking us forward, and in order for him to take us forward we've got to make him the best coach he can be, and that requires some new voices in the coaching area to support and guide and inform the program.
"If we do all that, we're confident Richo's going to have the capacity to improve our performance.
"We're going to support him, not blame him."
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Lethlean also put the St Kilda players on notice.
"If we don't get a response in the next three weeks from some of the players, their feet are going to be in the fire as well," he said.
"It's not a one-way street, it's not all about the coaching; the players need to take responsibility, need to work harder, need to look at themselves, understand why it is they can have great patches in games and really poor patches in games.
And the leadership needs to look at itself, too."
After keeping the Bulldogs goalless and taking a 21-point lead into quarter-time, the Saints were incredibly poor on Saturday night against a side missing the likes of Easton Wood, Luke Dahlhaus, Marcus Adams, Bailey Dale, Tom Liberatore and Liam Picken.
"It was a very disappointing performance; a completely different and less competitive output than the week prior against the Giants, and we've just got to get to get to the bottom of why that is. It's not good enough," said Lethlean.
"It's one of the poorer performances [of the season]. We were certainly under the pump with two players short, but that doesn’t explain the lack of competitiveness in the third quarter, which was extremely disappointing."
The Saints meet the Bombers on Friday night at Etihad Stadium.
