Brendan McCartney briefs his team during the game against Fremantle. Photo: Getty Images

Brendan McCartney has made an impassioned defence of the Western Bulldogs and his own dynamism as the club's coach, saying he is not as measured as it might seem from the outside and declaring the Dogs full of fight to return to premiership contention.

Responding to a Fairfax Media report that placed the Bulldogs last among Victorian clubs in terms of outside interest, McCartney dismissed the "relevance ladder" and backed his team to mirror the successful rebuild he helped orchestrate at Geelong in the mid-2000s.
"I'm probably not as quiet and easy-going as people [think]," McCartney said. "We've got enough intensity here. There's plenty of fight here too, don't worry. There's plenty of fight in this place.
"I've been in a club before where it didn't matter what happened, the wheels kept whirring internally, we kept working as a group, we kept working on our players. And the wheel turned. And I've got a feeling it'll happen again here."

McCartney said a coach was "a fool if you don't hear feedback", but an even bigger fool if it became a distraction.
He defied recent opponents Fremantle, Gold Coast, the Melbourne outfit the Dogs defeated before the bye or Adelaide and Essendon – who got over the Dogs in close games – to have found his team "invisible".
"I just urge people to have a look at a lot of these young people that we're playing, who are now starting to get more comfortable on an AFL ground," McCartney said.

"There were bits of play out there last Sunday [against the Dockers] where three or four of our younger players were around the ball, and they had experienced players around the ball, and we beat them. We're going to be OK here. The relevance ladder will take care of itself, I guess."

As the AFL presidents prepared to meet on Wednesday to debate the equalisation measures championed by Bulldogs president Peter Gordon, McCartney reiterated the club's pledge, made early in his tenure as coach, to "win" the west of Melbourne and make the area its heartland, and to win games.
"And every minute of every day that's what we chip away at."
Of Gordon, he said: "I loved our president fighting for us, it made me feel pretty good actually to know that our leader's prepared to fight to make it a fair landscape.

"But for all that, our responsibility is, whatever money we have and whatever resources we have, we do every single thing right by it within our power. Control what we can control."

Looking to Saturday night's home clash with Brisbane Lions, the coach predicted an immediate and telling response from his captain Ryan Griffen after he was kept to just 10 touches by Ryan Crowley against the Dockers.
"He'll play well. With due respect to his opponent, he was brilliant at what he did. All great players have a couple of days a year where they can't exert the influence they want on the game. The sort of person Ryan is, he'll bounce back, and his teammates will help.

"He's much loved and respected in here. And he's most loved because of his humility and his decency and his deep love of the club. No one tries harder here than him."

McCartney said the Dogs' training session on Wednesday morning would decide the make-up of what he tipped would be "a pretty mobile forward line" against the Lions, with Liam Jones available to return from suspension and Jarrad Grant vying for selection for his first game of 2014.

"He's close," he said of Grant. "He was three months out of the game, which is a long time. He played three quarters in the VFL, then a full game and missed a game because of the bye but played another and missed a game because of the VFL bye.
"So it hasn't been a perfect lead-in. He could be a game short, but he's close and one of the boys in the mix."




Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/afl/afl-new...#ixzz33dcJEmxA