West Coast coach Andrew McQualter has admitted his Eagles are trying to evolve too quickly, saying they had “gone backwards in the last few weeks” after falling to a fourth consecutive heavy defeat.

Both West Coast and St Kilda were 2-4 headed into their clash at Marvel Stadium on Sunday, but they looked like teams at the opposite ends of the ladder for nearly the entire four quarters as the Saints ran out dominant 22.11 (143) to 5.12 (42) victors.

Following consecutive wins against North Melbourne and Port Adelaide, the Eagles have lost their past four games by an average of 82 points, including triple-figure beltings from the Saints and premiership fancies Sydney.

McQualter lamented his side’s defence, which he said was not up to standard as they gave up 137 uncontested marks to the Saints.

“Our game has gone backwards in the last few weeks, that’s evident for all to see,” he said.

“For us, we’re getting a pretty clear formula on what we need to do in our game to be able to be competitive, and that’s around our defence and pressure on the ball and our ability to stop teams taking marks.

“The Saints (on Sunday) had (137) uncontested marks, and I think our pressure rating was 1.53 or something like that. That is not a formula for winning ever, and it’s probably a formula for losing by 100 points.

“We have got an incredible amount of work to do in that space from a defensive intent point of view and a system point of view.”

Asked about why the Eagles had taken such a significant step back so quickly, McQualter said: “We’ve got a bit of an idea. We’re trying to evolve our game, and there is potential that we’re trying to evolve a bit too quickly with the group we’ve got.

“We have to find that balance of ensuring that the way we play, we can defend and we can stay in the contest.”

McQualter said the challenge of coaching young players was that they tended to focus on the immediate lessons and forget past ones, which hurt their game.

“What we learned from those few games where we were able to win is we were playing the way we wanted to for the most part, and we just lost that a little bit in the past few weeks. It gives us a bit of evidence of what to go back to,” he said.

“This group is very coachable, which is probably no surprise for young players trying to make their way in the game. As a coaching group, you educate one thing, bang, that gets executed, but this part gets forgotten.

“So you educate that, that gets forgotten, so that’s where we’re going at the moment. We have to make sure we get our balance right in what we’re going after.”

While McQualter and the Eagles have a myriad of problems, one of their biggest is their inability to start games well.

They have lost all seven of their first quarters this season and have failed to kick a goal in three of their past four opening terms.

“It’s not always just a simple answer. Going in (at half-time) at 1.6, it’s deflating a little bit. We spoke about it at half-time, that is a real emotion that our players are going through when they know we’ve scored one goal at half-time,” he said.

“We acknowledged it, we worked through some ways we were going to improve our game, but it would be nice to get off to a better start.

“It’s real for young players, it fuels a bit of confidence if you start well.”