WEST COAST chief executive Trevor Nisbett has accepted responsibility for the scandals that have rocked the club but defended his job and said calls for his sacking were naive because no single person could change the player culture at a football club.

Speaking after yesterday's release of the Hendy Cowan-Steve Scudamore review of the Eagles' governance and management of player behaviour and welfare, Nisbett said the Eagles were on the way to achieving best practice on player behaviour.

The report looked at 35 incidents involving 13 Eagles players between January 2001 and December 2007, including links between players and underworld figures, assaults, drug and alcohol abuse and inappropriate language in public. It also revealed poor behaviour by two Eagles players during drug tests last year and poor behaviour by some players during AFL education sessions.

It made 18 recommendations, including the possibility of minders to look after at risk players, pressing for permission for club drug tests on players and linking 40% of the bonuses paid to Nisbett and coach John Worsfold to player behaviour standards.

Other recommendations called for the screening of future draftees to see how they fit the club's new core values and establishment of protocols for eliminating any underworld connections to players. The report said the club should ask the AFL and players association for a requirement for players to adhere to the club's core values to be added to contracts, with the potential for termination for breaches and bonuses if core values were consistently met. Cowan said he had tried to speak to sacked champion midfielder Ben Cousins, a central figure in the club's off-field woes, but Cousins had not returned his calls. Chad Fletcher, who collapsed mysteriously during an end-of-season player's trip, was interviewed but would not answer questions about the collapse. "This was not a witch hunt. We were not looking for a scapegoat. We were looking at processes, we were looking at structures and we reported accordingly," he said. The report said there were gaps in the club's structures and processes for management of player welfare and behaviour, particularly before 2006. It said club responses neither materially changed the culture of the club nor improved the off-field behaviour of some players. It was also the view of stakeholders that the club could have acted in a more timely and severe manner. But the report, which comes less than a week before an AFL inquiry into the club conducted by retired Victorian Supreme Court judge William Gillard is presented to an AFL Commission meeting, said that since 2006, the club had taken the necessary steps to improve its position.

Nisbett said he accepted responsibility but no one person was to blame for the club's player culture. "As a group, we are all accountable and we have to be. It is not a case of one person should have done this or one person should have done that," he said.

"If it was player behaviour and we had a person in charge of that, then that person would have to accept all responsibility but I accept responsibility for the management of that. We couldn't change the culture by the things that we were doing and that is a failure."

Club chairman Mark Barnaba defended Nisbett, saying anyone who wanted to solely blame Nisbett for player behaviour because he was chief executive also had to give him credit for the player behaviour reforms the club had instigated over the past 18 months. The report said the club got it wrong in the way it managed many of the issues surrounding poor player behaviour in the past. The responsibility for this had to be shared.

WEST AUSTRALIAN