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Western Bulldogs coach Brendan McCartney has taken responsibility for the team's slide on and off the ground, but again asked for patience from supporters as the club struggles through one of its lowest points in its recent history.McCartney said he would accept the brunt of criticism levelled at the Dogs following a horror week that began with confronting analysis of the club’s overall relevance in the competition, and ended with a surprise loss to the Brisbane Lions on Saturday night. The Bulldogs have won just three games for the season.
A report in Fairfax Media last week rated the Bulldogs last on the ''relevance'' ladder, which used a number of key measures - such as members, social media followers, crowd and ratings figures - to gauge the public interest in each club.
As the Dogs moved to dismiss the notion they had become ''invisible'' on the wider football landscape, losing to the struggling Lions - and doing so in front of just 18,054 fans at Etihad Stadium - was not the response the club and McCartney had hoped for.
The criticism aimed at the club centred mostly on the willingness of players and officials to contribute to the football discussion, maintain traction in the market and give fans reason to engage even when the team is not winning.
McCartney admitted building excitement on the field was another major factor in helping the club in its mission to ''win the hearts'' of fans in Melbourne’s western suburbs, and the Dogs were falling short in that area.
"You feel an enormous responsibility, not just to win games for your club and your supporters, but also to have your team play footy that is good to watch and footy that people respect,'' McCartney said on 3AW.
"What we’ve got to do as a group, all of us - me, the coaches, our senior players, our younger players, all our staff in the football department - is become a club where people just don’t go to the footy thinking, 'hang on, there is going to be a 20- or 30-minute patch here where they fall apart'. And I’ve got no doubt some of our supporters think that, and when it does happen like it did [on Saturday] night, it’s costly."
Former Western Bulldogs captain Matthew Boyd said losing close games this year had put the club under the media microscope, and said honourable losses were as demoralising for the players as they were for fans. The Dogs have lost three games by less than 10 points - to Adelaide, Essendon and the Lions.
“We are working really hard to win the hearts in the west and we’ve got a huge opportunity to build a supporter base in our community,'' Boyd said on Channel Nine. "But, obviously, wins help that, and that’s what we are trying to bring to the table now.''
Former Bulldogs star Nathan Brown, who thought the Fairfax Media report was "unnecessarily negative", said he was worried about the team’s game plan, theorising that McCartney had been influenced too much by his time as an assistant coach at Geelong and Essendon, where the plan was to kick long to key forwards.
Brown said he did not believe the Dogs had the quality marking targets in players such as Stewart Crameri, Liam Jones, Tom Williams and others to be successful with that game style, and suggested McCartney find a new strategy.
The Dogs’ inability to apply scoreboard pressure, despite being one of the best contested ball teams during the past five rounds, and generating enough inside-50s to do so, has been a source of frustration for supporters.
McCartney said the Dogs were not moving the ball as quickly as he wanted, which meant some of the long forward-50 entries were not as dangerous as they could be.
“We had significant opportunities in the last quarter [against Brisbane] to move the ball forward and we still ended up having more handballs than kicks," he said.
“It is a little bit of confidence and just people willing to put the ball under their arm and go forward and see what happens - and get the ball into the forward line to advantage.”
McCartney insisted the loss to Brisbane did not mean the Dogs had gone backwards, but had "perhaps stalled a little bit''. He said the Bulldogs were actually ahead of where it was at the same point last year before they went on a late-season run that produced four wins from six games.
“When I line us up with 12 months ago ... when we got behind like [Saturday] night, we were getting beaten by 60 or 70 points," he said.
"So we are finding ways ... to get back into the game and that's as frustrating as getting blown away - more frustrating at times - because people sense something might be happening and then we just fall short."
Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/afl/afl-new...#ixzz343QaRomw
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