A win for all footy dreamers

THE Bulldogs’ first flag in 62 years is a win for the dreamers — those grassroots football supporters who still prize loyalty ahead of the limelight and community before commerce.

Bulldogs players celebrate after the final siren in the Grand Final.

THE Bulldogs’ first flag in 62 years is a win for the dreamers — those grassroots football supporters who still prize loyalty ahead of the limelight and community before commerce.

The Doggies’ scrappy, harrying success is a throwback to a pre-AFL era, when football pitted suburb against suburb in an intensely tribal combat in which pride and passion were every bit as important as the outcome.

Even in that era, the Dogs were always a side that barely scraped by, relying on a sense of honour and pride in being “sons of the ’scray” to make up for bad finances and even worse facilities.

Saturday’s win was — at last — a vindication for all those who back in 1989 rattled tins and donated coins to save the club from a merger with Fitzroy.

Barely a generation on from facing down the seemingly inescapable merger, and two years after losing their coach and captain, the Western Bulldogs have built a premiership team based on ideals that cost nothing: mateship, and the simple mantra “Why not us?”

This team of the west has proved that the battle is not always to one of the AFL’s traditional powerhouses or interstate marquee clubs: flagscan be won without big names and even bigger bank balances.

Sure, the Dogs had a high-priced recruit in Tom Boyd. But the team of this proudly working-class club was not one studded with household names — though after the weekend’s triumph, that has now changed.

Rather, their success was built on coach Luke Beveridge’s simple recipe of getting his young team to trust each other and their ability to take on the game and play to their strength: fast, relentless movement of the ball.

It’s an exciting mix that earmarked the young Dogs as a team to watch.

It is a mix that has seen the perennial battlers become the first team in AFL history to win the flag from seventh on the ladder, winning two interstate finals on their way.

In an echo of Alastair Clarkson at Hawthorn, Beveridge has quietly instilled a selfless loyalty among his players that seems to transcend the traditional coach-player relationship, and allows them to achieve the improbable.

This co-dependence has enabled the tight-knit Dogs to overcome injuries to a number of their players throughout the year.

It’s an alliance that saw the Dogs, almost to a man, produce their best on the day when it mattered most.

And it’s the bond that saw Beveridge selflessly hand his premiership coach’s medal to injured captain Bob Murphy.

Like Hawthorn, Geelong and Sydney before them, the Dogs have also worked hard to strengthen their already healthy links to their local community.

This was shown by a reversal to their flagging membership and by the thousands who flocked to the Whitten Oval to watch, as one, Saturday’s victory unfold.

Whether the Dogs go on to forge the continuing success that has cemented the Hawks, the Cats and the Swans as the teams of a generation remains to be seen.

But even without their drought-breaking premiership win, the Dogs’ gutsy efforts throughout the finals campaign would have been certain to bring the club a flood of new members.

Thousands of jubilant Dogs fans descended on Whitten Oval again yesterday to thank their idols.

Continuing success and the right management could finally see the club lose its tag as the AFL’s battlers.

AFL Fans Association president Gerry Eeman believes sustained success could even see the Doggies’ 39,459 members swell to rival membership powerhouses Hawthorn (75,351), Collingwood (74,643) and Richmond (72,278).

“Australians love underdogs. They love people fighting against the odds, and that’s what the Bulldogs are,” Mr Eeman said.

“That has a lot of appeal across the whole of Australia.”

Having also won this year’s VFL premiership, the Dogs certainly now appear to have the depth to achieve lasting success.

Whatever the future holds, the current crop of Dogs has already written a page in the club’s history that will long be celebrated.

And the stories of supporters’ unyielding faith and passion, through five preliminary final losses, have been as inspiring as the team’s on-field heroics.

The club’s premiership surge has provided the sort of heartwarming publicity that no amount of AFL spending on promoting the game could buy.

The fairytale ending to what had been the longest existing AFL/VFL premiership drought is a story that has been embraced by football lovers of all colours.

And it provides a script that other clubs starved of success — think Melbourne (last flag in 1964), St Kilda (only flag in 1966) and Richmond (last flag in 1980) — would be well advised to consider.

It is also a win for the AFL.

And it should remind the league that football is about more than growing the game, about more than just signing TV broadcast deals.

It is about giving all football supporters the chance to dream.