It has been a challenging couple of weeks for the Club, culminating in Brendan McCartney’s resignation today as our Senior Coach after it became clear his position had become unfortunately untenable.

The Board and I support his decision and believe it is in the best interest of the Club.

The Board took the decision to support Brendan staying on late last month following a review that included serious critique around communication issues that had been raised by a number of people including our captain Ryan Griffen in relation to the Coach.

Macca accepted the validity of a number of these concerns and readily agreed to participate in a number of measures we put in place to help him address them. While we were all committed to working hard on these issues, we and Macca himself were concerned about whether the position was recoverable.

While we believed that the issues had been aired appropriately and solutions found – as agreed to by Ryan - yesterday’s news in relation to Ryan’s change of position meant that the Board needed to further consider the matter with Brendan.

Ryan’s unfortunate change of mind in the last few days in our judgement has had principal effects:

1. It took away one of the central planks – the support of the Captain which had been pivotal and even critical in our decision to press on with Macca.

2. And it created a new impediment in that in 2015, Macca would be communicating his message to a group who even with the best will in the world; would have this difficult event entrenched in their minds, whenever hard messages needed to be delivered.

When we met yesterday, I asked Macca whether his best judgement was that he could overcome these new significant impediments.

He was uncertain. He asked us to get some further feedback from some key people. We spent a lot of yesterday doing so. The feedback was not all one way – but it was sufficiently compromised to make it clear that Macca’s task next year would have been extremely difficult; and his continuation might itself present an impediment to our continued improvement.

Macca therefore made the decision to resign as senior coach, a decision that is supported by the Board.

Some of you will agree – others will not. That’s your right as a Bulldogs person.

Brendan is a good man. As President, Board and Senior Management – we all like and respect him. And we want to thank him for his significant contribution in building our Club.

There has been a lot said about our review, our Club and our players – and indeed our Board – over the last month.

Lots of old footy sayings like “you can let the players run the Club” have been trotted out. They are too simplistic for the complex environment of the management of professional AFL Clubs in the second decade of the 21st century.

I want to say these things about our group:

a. Our players do not run the Club of course. We the board and senior management do. But we make decisions based on evidence and our best judgement – and it is only appropriate some of the evidence comes from the players.

b. I’m very proud of our players. The fact that they had these concerns but that their first and predominant position has been to look to work through them and reflect on what they themselves needed to do to get better and make things work better reflects well on them as a group.

I want to thank our players for their honesty and concern yesterday.

Foundations are strong for an exciting future if we hang together and continue to work hard.

We now will look forward to an extensive process to appoint a new senior coach and continue to strengthen our club.

Peter Gordon
President