AFL top 100: The wash-up – Western Bulldogs

The most devastating news for the Bulldogs as they review their 2018 season will be the highly likely defection of Luke Dahlhaus to Geelong.

Dahlhaus has stood out like a beacon over the past two years as the team awoke to the reality that a second premiership was not in the offing and that the world had passed them by.

Although officially only the third most senior player on the list in terms of games played, with Dale Morris playing only 11 games and Liam Picken missing the whole season with concussion, Dahlhaus, with considerable help from Marcus Bontempelli, shouldered the load of being the unofficial leader before missing the last four games of the year due to injury.

The other game-players on the current top 100 list were not much help – Jordan Roughead and Easton Wood played 12 games apiece and Tom Liberatore was injured in the first game and out for the season. By the end of the year two new names made it into the top-100 game-players list: Mitch Wallis overcame a slow start to make it into the team in Round 3 and played 18 games for the year to finish in equal 87th position with Ross Abbey, a handy utility who played for the club between 1971 and 1981; and Jack Macrae climbed into 92nd position with back pocket player Leo Ryan, originally from Fish Creek in Gippsland.

Goal-kicking wise, the only three teams that the Bulldogs scored more points than were Fremantle, Gold Coast and Carlton, so the club’s effort finishing 13th with three wins in their last five games was extremely meritorious.

(AAP Image/Julian Smith)

Tory Dickson, the club’s current leading all-time goal-kicker and only top-50 goal-kicker at the club, contributed only eight goals. Dahlhaus kicked a disappointing two goals, and it was left to Bontempelli’s 22 goals – the last one being his 100th goal – and Mitch Wallis’s 20 goals to make up for the lack of major goal-kickers.

The Bulldogs’ first-year recruits also helped with the goal-scoring. Three of the eight new players tried were trades – Hayden Crozier (six years at Fremantle), Jackson Trengove (eight years at Port Adelaide) and Josh Schache (two years and 27 games at Brisbane). In Schache’s case it should be remembered he is still only 21 years old.

Of the others, only Billy Gowers is over 21, but only just. He booted 22 goals for the year in his 20 games and looks a likely long-term prospect for the club, as do youngsters Aaron Naughton (18 games) and Ed Richards (21 games). The jury is still out on the two other 21-year-olds, Brad Lynch and Fergus Green, but all in all I see the Bulldogs also having a lot more potential in 2019.

One final word on Dale Morris, who I tried to write off in an earlier article as too old and too injured to contribute much more to the Bulldogs. I am pleased to say that I was wrong, and I hope that he plays on in 2019 and has a most successful year.

An injury-free year with no form slump could see him pass Stephen Wallis, Daniel Giansiracusa and even Arthur Olliver from the Bulldogs all-time top-100 game-players list.