The Western Bulldogs began this year with a coach out of contract, their best tall forward’s life spiralling, their captain, key midfielder and best small forward all injured, and the whole club burdened by a narrative of a year of fractious uncertainty and distraction.
Bailey Smith had walked on them. They had jettisoned popular premiership pair Jack Macrae and Caleb Daniel, both aware for the previous year that they were on the outer and needed to move. All this fostered the idea of a club that was impatient to move on but labouring getting there.
The Bulldogs’ Marcus Bontempelli hols a possum skin ball before Saturday night’s game against Essendon.Credit: AFL Photos
Ten rounds in, the Bulldogs are as good a chance to win the flag as anyone. There is no reason they can’t win in September with the depth of talent they have, the balance in the team, the calmness that appears now to have infused the club and the clarity with which Luke Beveridge is coaching.
The biggest doubt on them is that their past two finals campaigns have been brief – eliminated at the first hurdle. But this team is better than those outfits.
Belting a poor team as they did on Saturday night is not the reason for this apparently sudden love for the Dogs. Their year-long form line is better than it looks at first blush, they have good balance across the field, play a fast and attacking style, and they are doing it without their best line-up on the park.
Bulldogs coach Luke Beveridge is on top of his game despite uncertainty about his contract for next season.Credit: AFL Photos
Firstly, OK, the criticism. This year they have lost to the three top-four sides they have played: Collingwood, Brisbane and now the Gold Coast (for now, at least, the Suns are in the top four). But let’s break those games down. They lost to Collingwood by a goal at the MCG without Marcus Bontempelli. They lost to Brisbane in stinking heat in Adelaide in Gather Round. Again, no Bont. And last week they came home late but did lose narrowly to the Gold Coast. That game was in Darwin, where the Suns are yet to lose.
If and when they lose it’s not by much, and when they win they own the opposition. Good teams don’t just win, they nail lesser teams. The Dogs have belted the Saints and Port and made Essendon look second-rate.
They have had less than a quarter this year with both Bontempelli and Sam Darcy on the field at the one time. Bont, probably the best player in the comp, and Darcy the player who morphed this year from promising forward to the unicorn recruiters figured him to be. He is the ghost of Paul Salmon past, wearing red, white and blue.
If Bont and Darcy string the back half of the season together, the Dogs can win the whole thing.
Sadly, Cody Weightman has not played all year, and will be as unsighted this year as Jamarra Ugle-Hagan will be in a Dogs jumper again.
Beveridge has engineered the change, and is coaching as well as at any time of his career. He turned over old premiership players, discovered Ed Richards as a midfielder last season out of necessity and has discovered Joel Freijah as another big-running mid this year.
He showed tough love to Bailey Dale last year – dropping him and favouring brumbies. Bracketed with the treatment of Daniel and Macrae, that looked like a coach falling out of love with his player, but it was simply Beveridge’s way of dealing with a player falling out of form. Suffice to say, Dale is back in form. He had 49 disposals on Saturday.
The Dogs play the Cats and Smith this week. The pre-match narrative will, no doubt, focus on whether Smith and the senior Dogs hate each other and what went wrong in his time there. That makes for good theatre, aided by Smith’s unfiltered niggles about Ballarat, but the bigger issue is where the Dogs are now without Smith and where the Cats are with him. Neither club has much to be upset about.
Bombed out
The natural tendency after a 15-goal belting is to gnash your teeth at how bad the loser was – and there is no sugar-coating Essendon’s ineptitude, they were terrible – but this loss was also far from a shock. It has been coming.
Five wins from six games said one thing, particularly when Sydney was one of those wins, but narrow wins against West Coast, North and Port Adelaide were a big step away from the Dogs on Saturday night.
Essendon players trudge off Marvel Stadium after being thrashed by the Western Bulldogs.Credit: Getty Images
The Bombers are just not that good yet, and certainly not good enough to manage without even a few players – Jordan Ridley primarily – when taking on a top four-worthy team in the Dogs.
The heavily Zach Merrett-reliant midfield was exposed when he was closed down by the Dogs and kept to just 20 touches for the night. The Dogs’ mids made Essendon’s midfield not only look poor in the contest, but slow around the ground, while Todd Goldstein hit a wall with their first and second-choice rucks missing.
The pressure applied by the Bombers across the field was of a level a junior coach would worry about.
It’s come to a head
Thursday night’s contest in Darwin is unlikely to be the game that finally forces a change to the head-high rule, but – like the Hawks’ 2008 grand final win, which forced a change to the rushed behind rule – it should be.
Nick Watson, Jack Ginnivan and Dylan Moore routinely earned frees for being taken too high. To be clear, what they did was work to the rules. The frees were arguably there because all players were caught high. The problem is that the umpires still have to reward players who bend at the waist, drop a shoulder low and rise into a tackler with the plan – the hope – to force the tackle up above the shoulder.
Even when he’s being congratulated by a teammate, Hawthorn’s diminutive forward Nick Watson gets taken over the shoulder.Credit: AFL Photos via Getty Images
The Hawks kicked 6.1 from frees on Thursday, not all of them for high contact. By the final siren on Thursday, they’d received 73 frees for head-high contact for the season, 23 more than the next most of any team, Adelaide. Then on Saturday, Adelaide received 11 head-high frees, which was equal with West Coast in round nine for the most high free kicks of that type any team has received in a game this year.
The difference between Adelaide and Hawthorn is the Hawks’ frees often go to their small forwards close to goal. Fifteen of the Hawks’ head-high contact frees have been inside their forward 50, the most of any team. They led that inside-50 head-high free stat last year also.
Port inside mid Jason Horne-Francis has earned the most high-contact frees this year, with 12. Behind him are Hawks Dylan Moore and Nick Watson with 10 each.
What does this matter if the free kicks are there? It’s the cynicism of the play. Players approach the ball with the intent to get it only so they can be tackled and win a free kick. The plan is not to evade a tackle so they can do something with the ball; being tackled is their end goal.
You can say it’s all about technique and the tackler needs to go lower to get it right. Bollocks to that. It is about the player – and the coaching staff instructing them – cynically using their heads to draw frees. These are the players’ heads that we are rightly told ad nauseam must be held sacrosanct in the rules, yet they do what they can to exploit this concern for their safety.
The playing group speak of their worries for their long-term health from concussions, yet every team has players who will weekly use their heads to draw free kicks. The game is trying to protect players from themselves.
A simple change is this: a tackle that starts at or below the shoulder and rises up to the neck or head should be a legal tackle. If it goes high, too bad. Contact is normally incidental or minimal, which is why players continue to happily stick their necks out for frees.
The Tigers show their respect for Kamdyn McIntosh after Sunday’s narrow loss to North Melbourne.Credit: AFL Photos via Getty Images
Can-do Kamdyn
Richmond built a premiership on stars and tough-drilled role players. Kamdyn McIntosh, like Jason Castagna before him, can be seen to define the Tigers’ premiership era as much as Dusty, Jack Riewoldt and Trent Cotchin. He was a very Damien Hardwick-style player and has become a very Adem Yze one.
He won two flags. He even polled two career Brownlow Medal votes and, in his first year, ambitiously won a Rising Star nomination.
On Sunday, he played his 200th role-playing game. He is a player that is the sum of his parts – tall, athletic, hard-running and disciplined – yet utterly limited. And he knows it. A man who knows his limitations.
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