I'm trying to stay upbeat, it's only one game after all, and it's a long season, but I'm really struggling. I actually don't think Melbourne covered themselves in glory; we just turned into witches' hats late in the second. They still made plenty of awful mistakes and we couldn't make them pay. Additionally, they came out blasting last year as well and then fell apart after 10 games. They have a long road to go too.

Some thoughts:

Our midfield is not as good as we think it is and we can't rely on it the way we used to. Libba is brilliant, Bont superb, but Macrae is dwindling, Smith has confidence issues, and Treloar is past his best. Even with Dunkley last year we struggled to deal with Oliver and Petracca. Melbourne just have a better midfield than we do, and so do a lot of teams now. We'll likely tear up lesser midfields, but we'll struggle with Geelong, Sydney, and Brisbane, probably Freo and Collingwood too. We're in the top 6 midfields, but I don't think we're top 3 anymore. I don't know how we fix this, given how much we've come to rely on them to carry weak bookends. To be honest, we might have fallen into rebuild territory here by accident. Smith is our only real up-and-coming midfielder. Where is the next generation of talent there?

The forward line will take time to cohere. Currently there's no reliable forward craft on display in the whole forward six. The strategy tonight was still to kick it to a giant blob with Naughton in the middle. Far from tearing their best defender away from Marra or Lobb, it just meant that that one defender - usually Lever - could cover our whole forward line in the one pack. I feel like this will slowly get better, but it will likely take several more years. Marra has moments of total brilliance but he's still not there yet. Darcy is a year behind him. I think after tonight I'm in the "Naughton to defence" camp. I doubt he'll ever become Tomahawk, and with zero craftiness he's preventing our other forwards developing chemistry with the midfield. The forward line is also still incomplete despite our investment in it as we have no decent crumbers. After tonight, I'm mad we took Weightman over Pickett. Sure he did that dog act on Smith, but it only seemed to fire him up even more. If one of our guys did that, he'd crumple. Regardless of positional or structure changes, I think this one will just take time.

We had no confidence tonight and we looked unfit. We still look for 2:1s on the ball carrier and allow the quick exit while failing to stick the tackle. We still can't take contested marks around the ground. We lose every footrace and our zone defence constantly fails to cut off quick players like Pickett and Langdon. No wonder our players don't really trust each other. It's too late to fix the fitness for this year (though we always seem to come back slow). The confidence is far more worrying. Libba is the only one who gets mad when we're losing. Dale and Bont were valiant, but there wasn't rage there. I can accept that we're not an angry team, and that we like to triumph over adversity with skill. But we need something to fire us up when we are losing. They've mentioned this as a problem in pressers. How does it get fixed?

What can you even say about Jones? Much lauded as the saviour of our defence, had one disposal then went off injured leaving us badly exposed yet again. Not really his fault, and Bruce did pretty well in defence, but we have zero depth here, and no other options (except Naughton). God I miss Moz and Boyd.

I don't know what to make of all of this. I hope we're just underdone and we'll see dramatic improvement from next week. But I won't trust a win against the Saints, and I hate not knowing which Bulldogs team are going to show up each week - the sad, slow, introspective one that just goes to water, or the silky, tenacious one that plays with focus and style.