Dogs saw plummet coming, says Grant

THE Western Bulldogs have admitted they feared a postpremiership plummet.

Bulldogs football director Chris Grant revealed club bosses identified the potential to slide — because of their young list demographic — in a review conducted in the weeks after the historic 2016 grand final triumph.

“We were mindful of our vulnerability,” Grant said.

“We are under no illusion and we weren’t even at the end ent reasons, but we had one month of unbelievable footy.

“All of the moons aligned for four weeks, but when we stripped it back and reviewed at the end of the year … we thought, ‘We’ve actually got some challenges in front of us’.

“We knew we were going to lose some experience — Matty Boyd and Bob Murphy — and so our development and improvement was not simply going to be in a straight line, particularly if we lost key, experienced players to injury.”

The 14th-placed Bulldogs meet red-hot Melbourne at Etihad Stadium today and are in danger of missing the September action for the second straight year.

Grant said while finals remained an aspiration, the blooding of younger players would start paying dividends next year. “We’ve actually got to start to play them … because by 2019 we’re going to be more advanced,” he said.

The Bulldogs’ average age on grand final day was 24.41 years, the third youngest premiership side since 1979.

“We weren’t under any illusion that just because we’ve won a premiership it’s now hunky dory and off we go and we should be performing like a premiership team for 2017,” Grant said.

“We were very aware that it was going to be a pretty tough year. We don’t have a Dangerfield-Ablett-Selwood midfield, so we know we have to rely on everybody playing pretty close to their best to perform well. That was always going to be a problem when you’ve got so many players under 50 games.”