Why can't the Western Bulldogs win it all in 2016?

At a time when fast football is in vogue, the Dogs are going faster than anyone. As the dust settles on two rounds of football, one question looms larger than any other: why can’t the Western Bulldogs win it all in 2016?

We talk all the time about sample size: how many games of football do we need to see before we can start really changing our mind on teams?

There’s no definitive number, but two is probably not enough. Because remember, as we discussed last week when creating some future headlines based solely on one round of football, we don’t really know what individuals and teams are capable of yet.

I mean, Geelong beat Hawthorn, but were then beaten by the Giants, who themselves were beaten by Melbourne in Round 1, and then Melbourne went and lost to Essendon over the weekend. So by the wins and losses of the season to date, Essendon are better than Hawthorn. Hey, at least there’s some logic to that take.

Just kidding, of course. However, there are some trends which we can start to parse about with some certainty. Let’s talk about the Dogs.

The symmetry of this season and last is too stark to ignore. In Round 2 last year, I penned a column titled “Just how far can the Western Bulldogs rise?” – which posited that they will be good, and better than we all expected, but that finals might be premature. Well, we find ourselves again at Round 2, and again asking the ceiling question: just how far can we expect this team to rise?

A long way. In fact, the Western Bulldogs might just win it all this season.

You were warned
Remember this stat?

“Of the 15 teams that have increased their percentage from 85 or less to 110 or more in a single year, 13 of them went on to make the finals in the following year.”

It was followed by this quote.

“Write off the Bulldogs at your peril.”

After two rounds of football, the Western Bulldogs sit as one of four teams with a clean sheet, and with an astronomical percentage of 264.9 – the highest Round 2 percentage in at least this century. The Dogs have eviscerated both of their opponents in Fremantle and St Kilda, in a manner reserved for the likes of Hawthorn circa Round 8 to 18 last season.

It is an ominous sign for the rest of the competition, notwithstanding that Fremantle are playing with the enthusiasm of a three-toed sloth, and the Saints are still the Saints. Indeed, if you wrote the Bulldogs off, it was at your own peril.

The torture chamber
This start to the year, when combined with their 2015 season – first under the true messiah Luke Beveridge – has seen the Dogs reel off a 13-2 record at the Docklands (including 11 straight victories) with a percentage of 159.7. The two losses came by way of a batshit crazy comeback by St Kilda in Round 6, and a run-of-the-mill defeat against a then-rampaging Fremantle in Round 7.

So in effect, the Dogs have now beaten every team they have played at Etihad in the most recent instance of playing them. Now, the list of victories isn’t exactly brimming with top line sides – last year’s victories came against three of the bottom four sides, and mostly mid-table teams – but the manner of those victories is the first order issue.

The key part of the Doggies’ percentage equation isn’t necessarily the numerator, or the attack number. At 106 points per game, it is a pretty stock-standard number for a decent side at home. It is, rather, the quite remarkable 66.2 points per game that the Dogs have conceded in their past 15 games at Etihad Stadium that sticks out.

While the Dogs might look like they’re all about the razzle-dazzle, under the hood lurks a medieval torture machine, squeezing and strangling the opposition and cutting off any hope of attack. The Dogs have worked their way into an inside 50 differential of plus-12 per game at the Docklands, despite averaging just 57 inside 50s themselves. The average for a victor in 2015 was 55 inside 50s for, and a differential of plus-8.

The Dogs have looked more pedestrian away from home, scoring 82 points and conceding 102 per game (with a 3-6 record in the home-and-away season), but Etihad is the unofficial kennel for these canines, and so a less-sterling performance in those unfamiliar surrounds is tolerable. And when you consider the Dogs play 14 games at Docklands this season, those out-of-home performances matter less.

But even away from home, the Dogs’ strength lies in their ability to keep sides contained. They conceded no more than the AFL average of inside 50s per game in seven of the ten games.

The method to the madness
They do this by playing harder and faster and meaner than any other side, but also through the employ of a sophisticated defensive zoning structure that is effective both in set plays and when the opponent is in transition.

Players are layered across the ground in a way that makes the ground seem small for the opponent, forcing them to go backwards to search for open space, or try and pierce the maze of players with precise kicking.

Or, indeed, to bomb it long and hope.

A lot of the analysis has centred on the Dogs’ want to lock the ball in their attacking half, but as these screens show (and admittedly, it is only one instance), it doesn’t matter where the ball is – the Dogs will hunt. And when the opponent makes a mistake, the Dogs are quicker than anyone to attack.

It looks like chaos, and in a lot of ways it is, but there is very clear method to the madness that Beveridge and his coaching staff create.

Every side has a zone defence now – even Carlton, now that a modern AFL coach is pulling the strings – but the Dogs are able to employ it so effectively because of the personnel they line up.

On Saturday night, the Dogs went to market with just five players taller than 190 centimetres: Tom Boyd, Jordan Roughead, Marcus Bontempelli, Marcus Adams and Jake Stringer. The solitary big-bodied key defender was Adams, and he’s not exactly tall by today’s standards (at 192 centimetres, he’s smaller than a lot of midfielders). And you could argue that he didn’t play a traditional key defender role – in fact, the Western Bulldogs don’t play traditional defence, period.

In this respect, everything they do is viewed through the lens of the opportunities it creates for an attacking thrust. They are the ultimate counterpuncher, the Sugar Ray Robinson of the modern AFL. Nick Welch covered the Dogs’ scheme in much more detail than we can here, yesterday.

It’s the people that matter
West Coast caught a lot of the limelight for their man-zone scheme last season, and for good reason: they lost their two best key position defenders, and were forced to innovate their way into competence.

It obviously came together better than expected, by virtue of the side’s ability to overwhelm with numbers and then quickly counter. We all missed that this is almost exactly the scheme that the Dogs employ, except for one key difference.

Where West Coast played a number of players that were good with the high ball, the Dogs have a team full of ground-ball machines that can make the opposition pay on turnovers once the Sherrin hits the deck. Unlike many other teams, that have forwards, midfielders and defenders, the Dogs have built a group of players that play all around the ground.

Mitch Wallis bobs up in the forward 50. Robert Murphy scampers through the middle of the ground. Jake Stringer plays as a centre-half forward. Easton Wood runs the wings. In many ways, they are a bigger, badder version of Hawthorn’s amorphous machine, but one that runs on the effort and intensity of a fleet of medium-sized footballers.

Perhaps most impressively is that the Dogs are doing it without a great deal of fanfare, or blue chip draft capital on their list. The Western Bulldogs have just five top 20 draft picks that were taken in the past four seasons, having genuinely moneyballed their way into some B-to-A-grade talent.

Sure, there are the likes of Stringer, Bontempelli and Jack Macrae, who were taken at the top. But looking through the list in some more depth reveals some quite remarkable steals.

Jason Johannisen, Lin Jong, Jack Redpath, Luke Dahlhaus and Liam Picken all started their AFL lives on the rookie list. So did Matthew Boyd and Dale Morris, albeit sometime around the time Australia was federated. The brains trust flipped a wantaway captain – who, just quietly, might have passed his peak while he was at the kennel – into a number one draft pick, and have bolted on useful pieces for chump change in the trade and free agency markets.

Johannisen has started the year off in very impressive fashion, producing a handful of highlights in just two games with his straight-line speed and quick hands.

But the best example of the Dogs’ moneyballing is Caleb Daniel, whom they picked up in the 2014 draft in the middle of the third round. The only reason he slipped so low is because he’d struggle to get past the carnies guarding the rides at the Royal Easter Show.

In his first dozen games, Daniel has shown the kind of composure and deft touch with the ball in hand that he did all throughout his junior career. And guess what? His size doesn’t matter. At least not in this scheme, where he can be a true, old-school pack rover.

The knockers will come knocking
While the Dogs’ scheme is effective, it still has some holes.

Like most sides, the Dogs don’t employ a genuine tall defensive stopper, and so they are prone to give up bags of three or more goals to elite key position players from time to time. Like West Coast, the cream of the small forward crop can also sneak their way through the Doggies’ finely tuned zone. Eddie Betts lit the Dogs up with nine goals in two games last season, and Chad Wingard kicked five.

There are tall defenders on the list, and Beveridge has shown in his time at the helm that he’s not afraid to pick on form alone and let the tactics adjust around that, but right now, if it’s not broken, why fix it?

Their performances away from the torture chamber are different enough to mean questions can be asked: the Dogs recorded an average disposal differential of plus-32 at Docklands, and minus-43 anywhere but the Docklands. That’s a stark difference; and is in keeping with the advantages that non-Victorian sides manage to engineer on their home grounds.

As above, there’s nothing wrong with this prima facie, particularly given the Dogs will play at least 14 games per year at Etihad as long as the ground remains standing. However, like every team, they will have to win at the MCG at least once throughout the season – even if that’s on grand final day. Just ask West Coast and Fremantle how burdensome that monkey is.

Related to this, it is unclear that the Dogs have a plan B or C – or at least one that they have had to pull off the shelf. The players they employ have shown a flexibility and adaptability that is becoming crucial to the modern AFL – it will be interesting to see what happens when an opponent manages to break the system. The last time a side with no apparent plan B that was figured out was Port Adelaide.

Which leads us to this weekend’s festivities.

The Dogs will host the ubiquitous Hawks, who forced the West Coast Eagles through a fine mesh screen in Round 2. Seriously, the margin of this game should have been 100 points or more, such was the dominance Hawthorn exerted over general play. It was wastefulness inside 50 for the Hawks, and relative efficiency by the Eagles, that kept the margin to shellacking rather than obliteration.

It was billed as a grand final re-match – it ended up being a grand final replay. Hawthorn by 46 points.

During the three-peat era, the Hawks have played at Etihad 11 times for a 9-2 record. They have scored 117 points per game (oh yes), conceded a shade over 82, and have failed to reach triple digits on just three occasions. It is fair to say they play the ground well – their overall average game margin over the past three seasons is 34.5, compared to 35 at Docklands.

Hawthorn will start as favourites – as they should until someone proves that Alastair Clarkson isn’t in fact a football cyborg from the 31st century, with a supercomputer inside of his half-man-half-machine cranium. But the Dogs have the cattle, and the tactical nous, to give them an almighty scare.

Getting close to the champs on Sunday might be enough to put the Dogs into the genuine flag contender conversation.

Remember the stat at the opening about sides backing up their surges? The 2008 Hawthorn side were one of those 13 teams that ended up making good on a big prior-year percentage increase, but they didn’t just make the finals. They won it all.

Why can’t that be the Western Bulldogs in 2016?