Eade’s tenure at Dogs is in serious trouble

 

Roar Rookie

By Leigh Eustace, 4 May 2011 Leigh Eustace is a Roar Rookie

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 2011 AFL season, AFL, David Smorgon, Rodney Eade, Western Bulldogs

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One mustn’t look too far ahead, otherwise you lose perspective of the present. Unless you’re Rodney Eade. For him to look too deeply into the future at the moment looks down-right scary.

The Western Bulldogs have been everyone’s second team the last few years come September, from when Geelong reigned supreme, through St Kilda’s super run, and now the domination of Collingwood.

All along the Dogs have been there and thereabouts. But as a proud David Smorgon knows, there and thereabouts doesn’t win premierships, and, more to the point, it gets very tiring and frustrating after a while.

The long-suffering supporters have been without the ultimate success since 1954 and the growing feeling in recent times is that they would have their best chance in decades to double up.

Semi finalist in 2006, three straight preliminary finals from 2008-2010, a pre-season cup the season before last, the Western Bulldogs have in recent pre-seasons been considered a real chance to be mounting the podium on that last day in September.

Alas, the perennial bridesmaid, they have been falling a hurdle or two short. You can’t knock them for their consistency, I suppose.

So that brings us forward to Eade’s 2011.

In the final year of a contract he fronts an administration headed by an ambitious president, yearning to break the shackles of ‘close but yet so far’, with, perhaps unfairly, not much to negotiate with.

Preliminary finals are a fantastic achievement but when you’re yet to even make the big stage and put yourself in with a chance of winning the cup, it starts to lose its gloss.

Smorgon in so many words has suggested his senior coach needs to at worst keep making the penultimate weekend, preferably make the final two, if he desires an extension at the Whitten Oval.

How does this become relevant when we’ve only just closed the chapter on Round 6?

The Bulldogs eight-goal loss to Collingwood Sunday afternoon may have been the first nail in the coffin, may have been the first sign that Eade and the red, white and blue may part ways after a relatively prosperous yet ultimately unsuccessful seven years together.

2011 so far has seen the Bullies dismantle little resistance in Brisbane and Gold Coast at Etihad Stadium, look a class below Essendon and again when it mattered against Fremantle and Collingwood, and whilst early in the season they languish 11th on the ladder below Richmond of all teams.

It’s early, the season is a marathon. But no matter how confident one might be in their own ability, who would want to give good competition a head start? Good luck trying to sprint down good clubs in the back end of the season?

It comes down to whether the Western Bulldogs are good enough to challenge for a premiership when we know you need to make the top four to be a definitive chance.

With a loss this weekend to Sydney in Canberra the Dogs can almost say goodbye to a top four chance, particularly if Hawthorn can account for Port Adelaide, Essendon can defeat the West Coast, Fremantle can attain for Richmond and Carlton can manage St Kilda this weekend.

If these results occur, which would hardly surprise tipsters, the Sons of the West would all of a sudden be two games behind the Hawks, two and a half behind the Bombers, three behind the Dockers, and three and a half behind the Blues.

We are all content with handing Collingwood and Geelong the top two spots at this stage, so that leaves two of the double chances remaining, and if the aforementioned goes as predicted, we’d have four relatively in-form sides battling away for those final positions with the Bulldogs all but forgotten.

A loss in Canberra and Eade can start thinking about that European summer trip he might have always wanted. Top four will be gone, or even with the greatest of runs-in barely achievable, and therefore any chance of reappointment.

Which, if we’re frank, for a good coach who has produced a good side for a good few years now, would be stiff.

But no-one appoints coaches, or re-signs coaches for that matter, on sentimentality and good will. The AFL is a cut-throat, do-or-die business. A billion-dollar business from next year in fact.

And you’ve got 18 clubs who are playing by the same KPI, and unfortunately for 17 of them only one can reach it per year.

For ‘Rocket’, he has been only a week or two off from achieving that KPI on numerous occasions but you try telling your own boss he should keep you because your ‘consistently close’.

We like the Western Bulldogs. They always punch above their weight, they’ve struggled over the years; when they were rattling tins we all hoped they’d survive.

Like previously stated, they always seem to become everyone’s finals team should theirs not make it – your second team when you’re not emotionally involved.

And for Eade, should he fall short of anything other than four points in the nation’s capital this weekend, he can see the Dogs as the same from next year, too.

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