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I applaud Cameron Rose’s article on the Western Bulldogs this morning and without looking like I am doubling up, I had planned to write about the Dogs after last Saturday’s shocker against the Gold Coast.
The was one of the lowest lows – almost as dark as those dreadful days of 1980 until 1982 when they won a total of ten games.
The Dogs have won just one victory from their past 19 matches. That none of these losses were in single figure margins shows the club is not heading in the right direction.
Coach Brendan McCartney, with his endless spin and optimism, keeps telling the media and the footy public that they are improving each match. Is he watching the same team?
How he could think there were improvements in the Gold Coast game from the North effort is ridiculous.
The Dogs started well against the Suns, who looked flat early, but after the first two goals were inaccurate and didn’t take their chances late in the first term to set up a substantial lead.
There were encouraging signs that their experienced players, of which they had the third most number of 150 plus gamers playing of any club, were leading from the front and were going to be too experienced for the young Suns.
However, as has been the case with the Dogs since McCartney took over, the forward line doesn’t function for long and teams can too easily close them down.
They seem to tire badly in the second half of quarters and that could have a lot to do with this simple yet complicated game plan of total football. This system demands Western Bulldogs players swarm around every contest and win the contested footy, but once they do that they can’t execute the basic skills to finish the hard work off.
The last ten minutes of the third quarter was embarassing when Gold Coast, in only their third season in the league, piled on six unanswered goals to blow the Bulldogs away.
Brendan McCartney has gained a reputation at Geelong over a ten year period, which included two flags in 2007 and 2009 of being a fine development coach and some of that club’s finest players in this golden era like Matthew Scarlett and Corey Enright love him, but to me that seems to be his level.
In my dealings with him, he is a lovely, friendly and sincere person, but that doesn’t mean you will become a successful senior coach in such a brutal environment like the AFL.
He has been steadfast in how he wants to develop the game plan and what he wants to teach them – putting steps in place as you would at junior level in how he would like his charges to play.
McCartney has come in and from the outside, it appears he felt he needed to completely overhaul the playing style.
Why? Rodney Eade for mine did a great job with what he had to get the team to three consecutive preliminary finals.
There were two better sides to defeat the Dogs on each occasion, so I’m not sure massive changes were required to the game plan. They were still pretty competitive in Eade’s last year on the back of some bad injuries to key players at the time in Brian Lake, Adam Cooney and Ryan Hargrave.
The players seem to be struggling to adapt to McCartney’s game style, which clearly isn’t producing enough goals. The coach is saying that if the team win the contested footy, the scoring will take care of itself.
How? The Bulldogs don’t have a method to do this, and don’t know how.
That was especially evident in the second half of last year and except for the round one win over Brisbane, where the Lions were clearly not switched on, that hasn’t improved after eight rounds in 2013.
McCartney hasn’t been helped by the poor recruiting and that’s been covered in good detail by the many comments to Cameron’s piece.
By now, if you have your recruiting right, at least a couple of players from each of the drafts between 2005 and 2009 should be regular fixtures and stars in their team, especially the first round selections. Geelong is a prime example of that.
Yet the Dogs have had too many misses, with Christian Howard at 15. Bulldogs’ Recruiting Manager Simon Dalrymple’s first ever draft looks like one of the biggest howlers in recent times.
They have too many unskilled inside, slow moving midfielders, and keep playing unattractively to shut down football.
McCartney is almost halfway through his three year deal and he has said like Mark Neeld at Melbourne that this rebuild will take him five to six years.
Unfortunately despite his best intentions this is a footy club that has the lowest membership of the Melbourne based sides and struggles financially and for relevance.
It can’t afford to keep losing in the manner it is at the moment where there is no light at the end of the tunnel.
No matter what happens for the rest of the season, there won’t be many wins.
McCartney should see this season out, but 2014 would be the right timing for a seasoned coach to get the Dogs back on track.
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