The Bulldogs ARE Contenders

The Bulldogs ARE Contenders

GuyWhoLikesSport

The 2024 season looks like it will be a Sydney than everyone else type of year.

At the top of the list of “everyone else” has to be the Bulldogs, even though they sit 11th especially as they get their players back.

This column doubles as a mea culpa.

Earlier this season I wrote that the Bulldogs are badly coached, I felt that they were more engineered to be a SuperCoach point factory than a football team.

They were the footy equivalent of a comedy show that’s looking for the audience to cheer them, rather than making the audience laugh.

They lost sight of the most important thing, which for football teams is winning games and for comedies it’s making people laugh.

The best example of the latter is the later seasons of Brooklyn Nine-Nine, which had to make sure the audience knows that the show knows that police killing innocent people is a bad thing.

I got sidetracked. What were we talking about? Oh yeah.

I was wrong.

They have been 3-1 over the last 4 weeks with wins over Richmond, GWS and Collingwood, with their only loss a life-and-death struggle against Sydney.

But more than the results, Luke Beveridge’s tactical innovations have really started to pay off, as has his persistence with certain younger players and tough love with other ones.

My biggest gripe with the Bulldogs was that they over possessed the ball without necessarily doing enough with it.

Early in the season their midfield would put together beautiful passages of play.

The issue was that when the ball finally got outside of a contest, the Bulldogs had committed so many players around the ball that there were no forwards to kick it to.

With Jamarra Ugle-Hagan, Sam Darcy, Rhylee West, Aaron Naughton and the rest of their gun forwards, it was like Amsterdam. Great actors working with a shitty script.

The worst example of that was the Essendon loss in Round 5.

The Bulldogs won the disposal count by three disposals because they had 43 more handballs and won the inside 50 count, yet lost by five goals because they appeared more interested in chaining together handballs than kicking goals.

They were all sizzle and no steak.

While this is still not a supremely efficient side going forward, they’re scoring heavily sitting fourth in total points.

In terms of method, they are the number one team in the AFL this season at scoring from stoppage, they are seventh at scoring off turnover but surprisingly 11th from the defensive half.

Last season, by way of comparison, they were 13th from stoppage, ninth from turnover, and 14th from defensive half while maintaining a spot in the top-5 for disposals.

Clearly this team has learned that you don’t score points by chaining handballs.

Personnel tinkering has also elevated the Bulldogs.

The first move, and the one that I most misunderstood, was the move of Aaron Naughton up the field.

I was critical early in the season of Naughton’s lack of goal-kicking because, like other idiots, felt that as a forward Naughton should be kicking goals.

What I didn’t appreciate was how much further afield Naughton was playing to clear space for Jamarra Ugle-Hagan, Sam Darcy and Rhylee West.

While he kicked 22 goals in his 11 games this season before he was sidelined with his injury, Naughton averaged his career high for inside 50s, metres gained, possessions, and score involvements, he was playing true CHF.

Like an attacking midfielder in soccer, he brought together forwards and midfielders, and he tied the team together forward of centre.

When he returns from his injury, he will be judged on that more than pure goal-kicking.

The other biggest change was Ed Richards, who also didn’t play on Thursday night against Collingwood.

This season he has moved from half back into a true midfield role attending 10 centre bounces per game and averaging three clearances.

More than the numbers for Richards, it’s the speed that he brings to an otherwise slow midfield.

He, like Naughton, is a link between midfield and forward that they have lacked in previous years and even early this year.

A key addition has been Ryley Sanders. He has played the two best games of his short career in his last two outings against Collingwood and Sydney.

The value of Sanders is his inside/out ability, as well as his mobility. Sanders is a player who can extract a ball from a stoppage, or contested situation, and make it uncontested with his explosiveness. Against Collingwood, for instance, playing mostly as a midfielder, he had four clearances, seven contested possessions and 11 tackles.

He also had 200 metres gained, 5 inside 50s and 4 score involvements.

Players like Jack Macrae as he has aged and Tom Liberatore when he is back are a bit samey, especially as Macrae’s mobility has gone downhill.

They are pure inside ball winners with very little dynamism either running with or using the ball, while Richards is mostly an outside player.

The value of Sanders is that he can supplement Marcus Bontempelli’s excellence, and bear some of the inside/out load that Bontempelli carries.

On Bontempelli, he is quietly having the best year of his career and is the single best player in the AFL.

This year has been his opus.

More than the tactical innovations, more than his willingness to throw the magnets around and see what works, what has impressed me is how soberly Luke Beveridge looked at his list.

So often the talk around the Bulldogs was that this was a list that was truly elite and that it was being thrown away by a mad scientist of a coach.

I fell into that too.

In reality, it was a list full of famous players who were, at various points in their careers, elite.

That doesn’t guarantee perfection.

He saw that he had a one-paced midfield, and tried to fix it with players like Ed Richards, Ryley Sanders and Riley Garcia, at the expense of more famous players.

He saw that he lacked connection between forward and midfield so he moved his most famous forward out of the forward line and let younger players have space to flourish.

He saw that he lacked pressure inside 50 so he clearly decided to play Rhylee (a lot of different ways to spell that name at the Bulldogs) West every week that he’s fit.

Unlike Olivia Rodrigo’s ex-boyfriend, Bevo is not a fame f**ker, he’s an edge seeker.

It doesn’t always work, and some of his droppings have made no sense (like Sanders mid-season) but he’s always looking for an edge. This season he might have found a few.

 

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