What's Eating The Western Bulldogs?

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What's Eating The Western Bulldogs?

The Bulldogs have shown glimpses of brilliance coupled with patches of football they’d rather forget and quarters where they seems like they can’t keep up.

The Western Bulldogs entered 2017 as the reigning premiers looking to defend their title. But a rash of losses – including four of the past five – has some critics wondering if they will even make finals. The on-field issues have also led football media allude to the fact that there may be off-field issues. It's not time for the Bulldogs to panic yet, but what is troubling the fancied premiership favourites?

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For Bulldogs fans who endured the 47-point loss to the Demons on Saturday, it was uncharacteristically grim viewing. But in the past month losses have become the new, short-term, norm: defeats to the Swans by 46-points, the Cats by 23 and the Eagles by eight. With eight minutes remaining in the second quarter, the Bulldogs had kicked 0.2 and the Demons had amassed a 33-point divide. The ball was bombed inside the Bulldogs forward 50 to a sea of defenders and forwards and somehow Liam Picken crumbed the loose ball. He dished the handball off under pressure to Luke Dahlhaus, who handballed it to Toby McLean, who then gave Caleb Daniel a look at the goals. From 35-metres out, working with a tight space, Daniel kicked the Bulldogs first goal of the match. It wasn't one of those game changing, run-on, kind of goals but rather a snapshot of how hard the Bulldogs have had to work for goals in the past few weeks.

The bizarreness in all this is that the Bulldogs should be the team that others fret over. They should be the entity that opposing teams crumble against. They should be the team that turns a game on its head with the flick of a switch. They've been all those things this year. We're talking about the same Bulldogs who finished seventh and won a premiership on the back of winning four cut throat finals. You can see why, though, during a Round 13 match in June between the Bulldogs and Demons – which the Demons won convincingly - we're asking questions about whether or not the premiers are the real deal or not in 2017. It's also left a lot of football pundits scratching their heads over the left field slump.

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Bulldogs head coach Luke Beveridge says current form has nothing to do with errant attitude but rather, he says his team's belief – read: confidence - has been challenged.

"Momentarily we've lost our momentum and trajectory, and belief in yourself as an individual and as a team can be fleeting," he said post match on Saturday. "We've kept it going for a while but at the moment we're challenged in that regard, so we're just trying to troubleshoot and problem solve and get ourselves in a mindset where we think we can really win again."

What Beveridge didn't directly admit to journalists is the Bulldogs have lost their mo-jo and he appears miffed as to why that has happened to his chargers and how to get back the mo-jo. He's hoping it'll reappear at some point in the coming weeks and it'll be a period of reflection where he'll refer to it as the hurdle his team had to overcome, had to have, in order to be finals ready. But would that be blind faith? The Bulldogs have shown us glimpses of brilliance coupled with patches of football they'd rather forget and quarters where they seems like they can't keep up.

Slumps are usually broken with a season-defining game, a line in the sand moment. With six wins on the board, the Bulldogs need to win at least seven from their last 11 games. They're living through their critical portion of the season now and if they can't find another cog or ways to fix their sleepy patches, they'll soon find themselves in a space where every week is do-or-die. And that's a taxing way to play football.

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Statistics show that some of the Bulldogs recent woes can be pinpointed down to not taking enough telling marks - contested and uncontested. The other glaring hole has been their lack of first use of the football. According to Footy Wire.com they rank 17 th in the AFL for marks and contested marks and 16 th for hit outs. Even the inside 50 numbers are middling with a weekly average of 53 (ranked 7 th in the competition).

You can argue that injuries have played a role in their deficiencies and they have, but those injuries have largely impacted their forward line set up. So far this season they've rotated 15 single players through their forward 50 zone. As talented as those players have been – Boyd, Stringer, Jong, Suckling, Dale – the unsettled line up has lacked cohesion and relied on Bontempelli's match-saving antics far too often.

This is evident in the last two weeks where the Bulldogs have only been able to muster up 8.8 and 6.6 against the Demons and Swans respectively. The Bulldogs have the 16 th best attack in the AFL with 137 goals – only eight more goals than the Blues. If Beveridge is searching for answers he need to not look any further than simplicity itself: fix the forward line, kick more goals, win more games.

Probably the most egregious statistic of them all is how the Bulldogs have won three first quarters for the entire season. They demonstrated early in the year against the Swans and Lions when they were trailing at half time, that they had the capability to run any team down no matter what opposition teams threw at them. The last two weeks has served as a stark reminder that this slow-start mentality doesn't work and being competitive for three out of four quarters doesn't make good modern day football practice. It makes for hard work. And other teams are aware that if they can jump-start the Bulldogs, they are every chance to win.

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Even Beveridge will admit his team has been deplorable at first quarters in 2017 and the fundamental reason why they've lost six games and why most of their games have been true arm-wrestles. And confidence – the key factor here - is something that can be found quickly or not at all, making the Bulldogs' future finals foray an unpredictable forecast.

Winning premierships are arduous and difficult to accomplish. Winning back-to-back is like finding a winning lottery ticket in the back pocket of your jeans at the laundromat. But if you look at the Bulldogs statistics, along with the personnel they've had on the park (and not on the park), you start to understand their challenge, why they've struggled to gel of late, keep momentum moving forward and develop consistency. This can only happen if the team is established and glued tightly together and the Demons showed them how valuable cohesion is in football.

Remember the 17-5 Dockers team of 2015 and the 19-3 Hawks of 2013? Both teams hardly had movement and were able to add parts in and take parts out when they needed to in order to understand what their best team looked like. If you are Luke Beveridge right now, you'd be second-guessing parts of the team line-up and probably making some knee jerk selections when certain player performances haven't delivered on team goal expectations. But what else can he do when the parts he needs are a) not delivering and b) in the doctor's room? And how does he coach for confidence? He can't.

For all the impotency of the Bulldogs forward zone, their defence has been stingy, with only 147 goals kicked against them – the third best in the AFL behind Tigers and the Power. Their applied pressure has been elite: they are ranked first in tackles. And they're efficient when they win the ball with a league ranking of third for effective disposal and 577 clangers (second least in the AFL). For a team lagging in the goal-kicking department, they are certainly adept at stopping goals, using the ball well and make life hard for opposing teams. Bontempelli (13 goals, av 23 touches) and Dahlhaus (av 27 disposals) are keeping the Bulldogs in check, within reach of the eight and post regular season action.

Consider this: the Crows have seven goal kickers with 11 or more goals; the Giants have four players with 12 or more goals. The Bulldogs have two - Stringer (20) and Bontempelli (13). They have the back half of the ground figured out, operating as the premiership team defence, but the Bulldogs need to find new ways to kick goals if they are to defend their 2016 Premiership