Leon Cameron believes the Bulldogs are suffering a sort of hangover from their career until last year’s Grand Final, and this, combined with several injuries, has made their performance not normal in 2022.
The Dogs had the grand final for the middle of the third quarter on September 25 last year, but their struggles since then are well documented.
Luke Beveridge’s troops are 8-8 in 2022, now two games out of the top eight after Friday night’s brutal defeat to Sydney.
Cameron, who left his post as head coach of the Giants earlier this year, believes the Dogs are well below their best moment.
“I probably think last year’s Dogs, that great end-of-year race in the Grand Final … made them fall a little bit?” he told SEN’s Crunch Time.
“Then you get to the players who have already been to the top of the hill and they say,‘ okay, I’m only a couple percent discount ’?
“You can have a one or two per cent discount, but then the other sides like Carlton and Sydney are at one and two per cent (more), so you just have that little change and it’s huge.
“They have probably only had difficulty overcoming last year in terms of the shape, flow and movement of the ball.
“It just means they’re going to go 97 percent or 98 percent, not 100 percent.”
As a coach who also saw his team make a massive Grand Final defeat to Richmond in 2019, Cameron sympathized with Beveridge by admitting that it’s hard to know what to do.
The Giants missed the final in 2020.
The former coach also suggested that it looks like the Dogs carry several injuries.
Captain Marcus Bontempelli has been managing a shoulder problem throughout the season, the 26-year-old for all his 2021 numbers.
He’s just one of many players Cameron speculated weren’t at their best because of their bodies.
“Secondly, it’s clear that Bontempelli has had a very tough year and feels for him because he’s the captain of the football club, and he’s such a brave player and such an outstanding player,” he continued.
“If the season is over and he dusted off, he’s probably in a hospital bed right now and he’s having shoulder surgery.
“You can clearly see that he only has 80 per cent and Bevo (Beveridge) will do his best to help him during the week and Bontempelli will do the same, (saying) ‘My name reads, I’m ready to play’.
“So there’s probably a lot of hidden stuff that people don’t know right now, people playing with some injuries and that’s probably happening to them, and people (who) come and take this task from where these guys are. “It’s disappointing, it’s not happening right now, so you put it all together, and your performances aren’t at last year’s level.”
Hopes for the Dogs final are at an end after Friday night’s defeat, they are now two games out of eight and play four teams ahead of them in the standings in their last six games.