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Sometimes it doesn’t matter how you win – just as long as you get it done.
So it was for the Western Bulldogs on Saturday night, their 25-point victory over a veritable Geelong 2nd team enough to keep their finals hopes alive for 24 hours at least, pending the result of Carlton’s clash with GWS.
It was the sort of performance, though, for which all tapes should be burned, all further copies destroyed, and the resultant heap of ash fired into space to make sure no living soul ever witnesses it again. This was, for large parts, every bit as ghastly, unedifying and embarrassing as last week’s loss to West Coast – and having sat live in the stands for every painful second of the latter match, that’s really saying something.
The Bulldogs didn’t win this match because, with their coach’s future on the brink and their season on life support, they galvanised to find their best footy when it mattered most. They didn’t win it because deep down they’re a good side and it was only ever a matter of time until the Cats folded.
They won it because Marcus Bontempelli strapped his Superman cape on and decided at half time that the Dogs would be going down over his dead body, which very nearly eventuated after a series of big hits left the captain bruised and battered by full time. They won it because Tom Liberatore and Adam Treloar offered just enough support to eventually overpower a Cats midfield that might be the weakest in the league. They won it because the most maligned man in the team replaced the presumptive All-Australian ruckman at half time and proceeded to have the most influential half of footy he’s had in red, white and blue by some distance.
Most of all, though, they won because Geelong were playing a team of kids and reserves that ran out of puff by three quarter time. Had even a semblance of the Cats’ best 22 been available, and even then had they not spurned multiple golden chances to lead by more across a dominant first half, this would have been the season-wrecking loss it looked like being anyway with five minutes of the second quarter to go.
Like I wrote about Fremantle’s jailbreak victory over Gold Coast back in Gather Round, this was a performance, four points or no, that epitomised every single part of the Dogs’ fall from grace since leading the 2021 grand final by three goals halfway through the third term.
Ironically, their chances of scraping into September anyway might have improved, because if I were Carlton I’d be desperate to ensure this was the team to play in an elimination final in two weeks’ time.
Structurally appalling both in front of and behind the ball, with little cohesion in a midfield chock full of superstars, and with a defence for whom the concept of standing a man appears to be a foreign one, the Dogs leaked goals out the back all night, right up until the Cats stopped being capable of challenging them going forward.
All of the above is down to Beveridge, as well as the coaching staff behind him that probably haven’t copped enough flak for this team’s slide over the last 18 months; but in fairness to Bevo, he can’t do much about the ghastly foot skills on display throughout the last fortnight, even from players still regarded as some of the best kicks in the league.
Three weeks in a row the Bulldogs have coughed up a gift goal with a botched short kick-out, the easiest disposal in footy: against Hawthorn and West Coast, it was Ed Richards missing a stationary target 15 metres away and seeing the ball sail back over his head, while at GMHBA Stadium it was Bailey Dale trying to pinpoint Bontempelli without paying heed to the Cat bearing down on him to force an inevitable spoil, and then disappearing into the ether as Ollie Henry waltzed into an open goal and kicked from the line.
Ghastliest of all in the above is that, with the ball in dispute 20 metres from goal, there are four Cats to three Dogs, effectively making a turnover there instant death unless the Cats screwed it up. That makes it either a doubly horrific decision from Dale to even try to hit up Bontempelli, with gains minimal and the risk astronomical, or the backfiring of a Beveridge set play because the structure that should safeguard it is in shambles.
I lean more towards the latter, even though Dale’s field kicking has fallen off a cliff since his All-Australian 2021 and really should be talked about more: the Dogs love the short chip kick-in into the corridor like no other team in the league does. It’s the kick that has, three weeks in a row, cost them a straightforward goal at a key point, because teams are alert to the trick and the kickers executing it aren’t pinpoint enough to make it happen.
If the Dogs were set on going down the middle, there would be more representation there than the two Dogs present as Dale kicks out. Dale would honestly have been better off going for broke and trying to hit one of them, thereby taking out the middle man and reducing the risk from ‘catastrophic’ to ‘deadly’.
Other teams go short with their kick-outs too, St Kilda and Carlton in particular; but they will in almost all circumstances pass to a free man in the back pocket, where teams are usually content to allow an uncontested, pressure-free mark, and then look to make gains up the boundary line where failure leaves out of bounds as a safe fallback. Or else just bang it long, try and take a contested mark or force a stoppage, and then go again.
The Dogs’ supposed contested ball and clearance strength should make that a valuable strategy; certainly more so than pinpointing a chip pass in the red zone in defensive 50 from the 16th-ranked kicking team of 2023. Dale went at 50 per cent disposal efficiency from 13 kicks on Saturday night – given his defensive capabilities are minimal and he loves a good high-risk high-reward pass up the guts, that’s just not good enough from a guy who you’d expect to sit in the mid to high 80s.
It’s not just Dale whose kicking has become a problem; Caleb Daniel was as recently as last year the top-rated field kick in the game, yet he’s slid to 95th this year, and while an 85 per cent disposal efficiency at GMHBA Stadium seems fine, there were an awful lot of scrubbed kicks that found their intended target on the bounce and ramped up the pressure on them.
On the outside, Caleb Poulter and Oskar Baker are quite honesty the worst-kicking wingmen in the league: for specifically outside roles (and honestly, the number of times those two sit in no man’s land in open space inside defensive 50 as their opponents run into the central corridor and mark is infuriating), disposal efficiencies of 58 and 43 per cent are abysmal.
Cody Weightman and Rory Lobb celebrate. (Photo by Michael Willson/AFL Photos via Getty Images)
Baker went at 46 per cent as well in the loss to West Coast, and 37 per cent from eight kicks as a fresh-legs sub against Hawthorn in Tasmania two weeks ago. He has practically one strategy when he takes possession: hoof it as long as he can, and hope for the best, and good luck trying to lead, Jamarra Ugle-Hagan. I lost count of the number of times Baker, Poulter and other wayward-kicking Dogs kicked the ball long and over the forward’s head down the line, giving Ugle-Hagan and his exceptional leap and hands zero chance as he was repeatedly nudged under the ball.
From a ball movement perspective, the Dogs are even shabbier: they struggle to hit a target inside 50 unless it’s Bontempelli or staring them in the face – Aaron Naughton’s inexcusable miss of a free Weightman in the first quarter to turn a two on one situation 30 metres out from goal into a Cats jailbreak the most glaring example – and all too often the plan is to bang it long and high and hope Naughton can hold on.
Sure, Naughton grabbed three marks inside 50 and Ugle-Hagan two from doing this; but Tom Stewart, always a thorn in the Dogs’ side for nothing else than the way they move the ball suits him down to the ground, also took seven intercept marks, five before half time, as he read the Dogs’ long balls as they were happening and was given no competition in the air.
Defensively, of course, the Dogs are a rabble: to let the Tom Hawkins-less, Jeremy Cameron-less, Gary Rohan-less Cats get 24 shots from 50 inside 50s, as well as 14 marks in attack, is a disgrace.
Individually, there are limitations, but that’s true of every team: St Kilda have been the stingiest defence of the season with Zaine Cordy and Dougal Howard playing key back, while the Pies are up the top too with Darcy Moore and a bunch of gutsy jobbers.
Alex Keath’s disposal has always been nightmare fuel, but now his defending is just as bad, and the rest of the group were so incompetent on Saturday night that it made Liam Jones look hopeless by association.
The most glaring example actually came inside the first minute: with three Bulldogs talls, plus capable aerialists in Bailey Williams and Ed Richards nearby, the ball somehow gets out the back of the stoppage anyway, with two Cats including Isaac Smith waiting in line for the easiest of goals.
The key issue here is this: either Tim English or James O’Donnell was in the perfect position to mark that ball, and actually quality defensive structures would have had it drilled into them for one to block and the other to fly.
St Kilda do that all the time, most often with someone engaging the opposition forward underneath the ball while Callum Wilkie flies in to intercept, or latterly Rowan Marshall. Hell, Beveridge and his coaching panel only needed to look at the other end for an example, because the Cats did it for Stewart time and time again.
This isn’t an uncommon sight, either: the Dogs let the ball out the back an awful lot, and it’s the major reason their defence gets shredded like Swiss cheese by sides both good and poor. Creating an overlap is the best way to score in modern footy, and with regularly a bunch of Bulldogs flying for the footy and either mistiming their spoils or ruining each other’s marking chances, there are extra opposition numbers at ground level to make hay.
On an individual level, there are regular examples of some of the worst defending you will see at AFL level: for all his improvement as a backman in the last few weeks, an O’Donnell howler in the third term sticks in the caw the most.
What this vision doesn’t show is, to begin with, O’Donnell is right with Shannon Neale as they run towards goal: what happens then, however, is he decides to peel off and come towards the back pocket to try and force the ball out.
The problem is that he does it both too late to make a difference, and then half-heartedly jogs there: by the time Tyson Stengle brushes a poor Dale tackle and gives to Ollie Henry, O’Donnell is still 15 metres off him, and caught in perfect no-man’s land between he and Neale, who is unguarded in the goalsquare for another simple tap-in.
O’Donnell may prove to be a fine defender, and he was arguably the Dogs’ best against West Coast and excellent against Hawthorn as well with his intercept work. There is a quality footballer there, and I don’t lay the blame on him nearly as much as on defensive coach Rohan Smith and Beveridge himself for clearly not ramming home the message hard enough that a key defender needs to actually defend sometimes.
Even stoppages, a nominal Bulldogs strength, were abysmal, with forward half scoring chances commonplace: there are about six errors I can find in just this one forward-50 stoppage that led to a Cats goal in the second term.
For starters, Tom Liberatore, the Dogs’ best coalface operator, is going head-to-head with the pacier Gryan Miers and starting five metres off the throw-in, and the team’s most tenacious tackler is also not occupying the dangerous space between the contest and the goals, where the Cats will go. Effectively, it takes the only superstar in attendance (Bontempelli was on the bench) out of the equation.
Elsewhere, the Dogs’ inexperience shows: Rhylee West doesn’t attend too many stoppages, while Toby McLean has been stuck in the VFL all season. Both have let their opponents, Brandan Parfitt and Tom Atkins, goal side by the time the ball hits the ground.
English then compounds all those problems by choosing to tap the ball back towards the corridor, for reasons unknown – when he does so, both Parfitt and Miers are leading West and Liberatore to the ball because, well, it’s in the perfect spot for them.
English fails to wrap Parfitt up as he charges through, and while Caleb Daniel slows him, his tackle is fatally flawed: aimed at the hips, it leaves both the Cat’s hands free; with great presence of mind, Parfitt waits a fraction of a second to handball and draws Hayden Crozier, the Dogs’ loose man goal side of the stoppage, to the ball.
Add that Crozier mistake to the list; he needed to know Parfitt, having been restrained by Daniel, wasn’t going to be able to kick, and instead of looking to smother, made sure he stayed goal side of Atkins, the handball’s target.
Parfitt flicks it over the top into Atkins’ space, who started shoulder to shoulder with McLean but now has five metres’ space on his direct opponent, and it’s the simplest thing in the world for him to run into space, snap from 25 out directly in front, and goal.
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The ease with which it was executed, not least that it came at the hands of a guy who has played VFL for a lot of this season in Parfitt and a guy in Atkins whose greatest traits are as a defensive midfielder, is despicable.
It’s an indictment both on the players involved – McLean showed no regard for defending an opponent in a position where that was crucial, and Liberatore needed to start in a more influential position – and even more so on the coaching.
The Dogs headhunted Brendon Lade from St Kilda last year chiefly as a midfield coach, ostensibly to fix up the stoppage issues that had seen teams score repeatedly on them since that famous flurry from Melbourne in the 2021 grand final. Marc Webb, according to the Bulldogs’ website, is in charge of stoppages and opposition strategy. Both should be embarrassed by what happened here.
Three-quarters of Geelong’s goals, by my reckoning, came from the sort of lapses a good team wouldn’t be seen dead committing. They’re exacerbated, of course, by the Dogs’ tendency to press high and leave open space galore out the back: but even there they’re sloppy now, as evidenced by the 95 marks the Cats took to three-quarter time, their highest since changing their game style at the end of 2021.
The Dogs are, when it comes down to it, a team of individual brilliance but who play as if they’ve just met one another at training during the week.
You can count on Bontempelli and Liberatore to be brilliant every week; ditto Treloar, who is in the middle of a fine season that perhaps explains the drop-off of Bailey Smith and Jack Macrae’s midfield opportunities.
Jones would be perfect if he wasn’t also having to guard the opposition’s best key forward, which at GMHBA Stadium backfired when the smaller and nimbler Ollie Henry ran rings around him. Naughton will take strong marks in attack and follow up well at ground level, and every so often he’ll kick straight too.
Then, if they’re lucky, a lesser light like Lobb will step up and have a brilliant game, like he did when moved into the ruck in the second half – a strategy that, by the by, I’m not convinced will have a similar result if it comes against Marc Pittonet or even Tom De Koning in an elimination final instead of a rapidly flagging first-gamer in Toby Conway.
In the state they’re in, the Dogs will take any win they can get, and the result at the Cattery probably secures Beveridge’s job for next year, even if they do miss finals.
But there is something drastically wrong at Whitten Oval. Wrong to the point a team with finals on the line can be thoroughly outworked and outplayed by a bunch of rookies with nothing but pride to play for, and needs them to run out of steam before doing what should have been done from the first bounce.
Fixing the myriad of issues facing the coaching staff will take a hell of a lot longer than one off-season, and the result is that us Bulldogs supporters will have our season ended in two ways: either at the hands of GWS taking back the eighth spot they inarguably deserve more, or at the hands of a Carlton line-up with a proper system to match its talent that will smash this team to smithereens if they squeeze into September after all.
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