'Bevoball' is no longer cutting the mustard out west

At what point do the Western Bulldogs draw a line?

Despite the team somehow sitting only a game outside the top eight with six matches left, it has been a disappointing season overall that has only further shone the light on the strangeness of the list. When they’re playing well, the Bulldogs are a unique team.

‘Bevo-ball’ is lauded, the abundance of quality midfielders squeezed into a 22 is genius and the statistics seem incredible.

When they’re not playing well, the Bulldogs are really a shell of a team that has good players, but a massive disconnect across the ground.

Luke Beveridge’s strange selections are no longer strokes of genius, but rather mystifying and no doubt frustrating for supporters. The Western Bulldogs have eight wins and eight losses after 16 games. They’ve won just two of eight games against teams in occupying finals spots at the moment and have generally been able to punish those below them on the ladder.

To make finals, they have to navigate three teams in the top-four of the ladder, as well as an equally desperate St Kilda, a GWS team trying to find a spark and Hawthorn in Tasmania. Now, Beveridge has had a lot of credits in the bank at the club.

He is the only coach in the history of the Bulldogs to have won 100 games, the only coach to lead the team to multiple grand finals, only the second-ever premiership coach they’ve had and of the 14 coaches to have been in charge of at 50 games, he has highest winning percentage. He is a two-time winner of the AFL CA Coach of the Year award, in his first two seasons at the club.

His legacy at the Bulldogs is set in stone and without doubt, he has brought fans some of the best memories they’ll ever have. For how long, though, do the Bulldogs and Beveridge dine out on the miracle that was 2016?
Even last season’s Grand Final appearance felt more like dominoes falling fortuitously into place rather than the dominance that was seen at times throughout the first 19 rounds of the season.

In his seven full seasons in charge, the Bulldogs have made finals five times. Thrice they were knocked out immediately and the other two were those magic carpet rides to the grand final.

(Photo by Dylan Burns/AFL Photos via Getty Images)

Beveridge has never led his team to a top-four finish and that remains true after his eighth season. Sure, it seemed a fait accompli with less than a month left of 2021. Then, the Bulldogs lost inexplicably lost their last three games of the season. A good team at 15-4 doesn’t do that, regardless of unavailabilities.
If Bulldogs fans had questions about list management decisions in the off-season, then we all had and continue to have a right to as well.

The clear deficiency on the AFL list was in defence. Beveridge clearly had no faith in Lewis Young, who spent his last two seasons at the club as a forward/ruck depth option who lacked positional continuity at VFL level, let alone AFL level. The powers in charge opted to let Young, a then-22-year-old defender in his career’s infancy, walk to Carlton for very little, choosing to chase Hawthorn’s Tim O’Brien, a failed forward who excelled in just a handful of games as an intercepting defender.

Who drove this? It’s an unknown, but that just means the blame can be shared across the board. Young has missed just three games this season for Carlton and has defended the equal third-most one-on-ones a game on average of players to have played multiple games. His loss percentage is below average, hovering around 32%, however, that’s the trade-off for the adjustment to playing tightly on opponents.

He’s rated elite for his 9.2 spoils a game, while his 2.5 intercept marks a game are rated above average. Young’s height and reach has proven to be particularly useful in a help defence environment, providing crucial spoils to cover his teammates.

Young got five games in 2018 and posted similar numbers with half the loss rate, bordering elite. Beveridge never revisited that.

Instead, 28-year-old O’Brien, who thrived in Round 22 2021 as an interceptor against the Bulldogs with 24 disposals and 10 marks, has played in defence and often, as an undersized key defender.

He’s eight centimetres shorter than Young, lost 40% of his one-on-ones and averaging less disposals and marks.
O’Brien’s also been dropped.

It’s easy enough to single out a couple of players and reflect on what could’ve been in hindsight, but these moves were baffling at the time and have aged poorly from even that position.

(Photo by Dylan Burns/AFL Photos via Getty Images).

Alex Keath and Ryan Gardner try their best, they really do, but the supporting cast isn’t there defensively, and it results in the Bulldogs being found out pretty easily.

25.05% of inside 50s against the Bulldogs result in a goal. That’s the fourth-highest percentage in the league and is only a few decimal placings off North Melbourne. Pretty damning.

There’s also the persistence to pick a number of mature-age VFL draftees to play in a substantial amount of games, which has been perplexing to supporters, let alone neutral observers.

When it finally seemed like Anthony Scott had found an influential role across half-back in the second half of the Hawthorn game, he was told to lockdown on Charlie Cameron the following week in a completely foreign tasking of responsibility and was subsequently dropped from the team.

With the bad comes the good and Beveridge does of course deserve credit for all that he’s done and what he continues to do.

This season, he has backed in Ed Richards and rewarded Rhylee West’s efforts, even if he may fall into that funky out-of-position bracket. Buku Khamis’s positional shift got him opportunities, Dom Bedendo has played a couple of games and the support he has given Jamarra Ugle-Hagan has been great.

Aaron Naughton, Tim English and Cody Weightman have all been beneficiaries of the confidence instilled in them by their coach, while the move of Bailey Dale to half-back has been an overwhelming success.

Yet winning tends to mask the issues underneath. Sometimes we see it as AFL fans but certainly, clubs have statistical access and analytical minds at their disposal to seek these deficiencies and are designed to proactively fix them. Instead, it feels like the Bulldogs are in a constant state of treading water. It feels like they get comfortable too easily and the coach tends to get locked into his own opinions of players and tactics.

So again, we must think, at what point do the Bulldogs draw the line?

If they’re happy constantly trying to sneak into the top eight and then cause damage from there, that’s great. Unsustainable, but great.

The ethos of the Western Bulldogs has always felt a little weird, unique at its best and baffling at its worst. At some point, change must come.

Beveridge has another year left on his contract, which makes for awkward timing if you think that one of the greatest coaches of all time has any interest whatsoever in your playing list.

Yet more than anything, Bulldogs supporters really just wanted clarity and a true understanding of the direction the club is going in.

Supporters are a club’s most important stakeholders and if they’re questioning weekly team selections or airing their grievances on social media as the defence capitulates once again, it behoves the powers at be to at least look at changing something.

2016 was incredible and 2021 was one wild ride, but you have to draw the line somewhere. One would think that a time to do so at the Western Bulldogs is nearing.