HAWTHORN coach Alastair Clarkson has declared that while his side's season may have spent time in football's intensive care unit, it's not dead.

The Hawks won in round one, but then lost the next six before beating Richmond by a kick last week and then smashing the high-flying Blues on Sunday.

The coach admitted that keeping the season alive and kicking had been a clear focus in the week leading up to the game.

"At some point in time you have to make a stand as a footy club and say our season's just going to fritter away unless we do something about it," a relaxed-looking Clarkson said after the match.

"There was a pretty strong resolve collectively through the whole group to do something about it.

"We had 22 guys who were pretty hungry for the contest today, and we were really pleased with their efforts.

"But we know that our season's still very precariously placed - we've got Sydney Swans next week who have been a great opponent of ours for a long period of time now, and we always need to play really well to beat them."

Historically, the Hawks haven't been a high rotation side, but racked up an amazing 155 interchanges for the afternoon.

"It really gets back to trying to keep our blokes fresh - we've probably observed from afar the other clubs in the competition and they've had some success with rotating their guys ... We've needed to try and move with the times.

"The Blues were a little bit unfortunate - I think they lost a couple of guys and they couldn't rotate as heavily themselves as they'd like to in the second half of the game.

"It's become a pretty important part of the game now."

Clarkson said he would endeavour to continue with the strategy.

"I think we'd be crazy if we didn't continue with the same sort of philosophy, but time will tell.

"We've wanted to rotate heavily in games before, but in the first game we had two guys out by half time, second game of the season two guys out by half time, third game of the season two guys out by half time.

"When you've got two guys who can't rotate due to injury, it just kills whatever philosophy you've got in terms of interchange rotations."