Phil Gould

And by...

2024, which was a couple of years down the track, we'd virtually turned over our whole top 30.

We brought a new roster in.

Many people sort of criticised it and doubted it.

But that roster of players has been able to play in the finals for the last couple of years.

Our coach has got into the rhythm of building the club on the...

standards and the style of football that we wanted to play we build it on bulldog dna of fitness and resilience in defense and the last couple of years we've been close to the best defensive team in the competition and i guess you know we've been continuing that sort of vein underneath that with an academy program hopefully to build young kids into bulldogs and and have them represent us in years to come to build a

an assembly line of young talent that would sustain the club into the future, et cetera.

Because most of the players we've got at the moment are recruited players.

They're players that started elsewhere and came to our club for an opportunity or came to our club to play regular NRL.

And they've done a wonderful job for us.

I mean, the last two years have been terrific for the club, terrific for the fans, terrific for commercial.

And there was real optimism about this year, so much so that we took on the gamble to go to Vegas this year and make a big event of that for our club.

And for all you were there, for what it was for our club, for our staff, for our players, coaches, once in a lifetime experience to experience that.

We were always wary of what that might do so far as effects on the rest of the season because some clubs have come back and struggled from that experience.

So we put a fair amount of time into preparing for that and getting it right.

And then our next goal was to make sure we come back and played well after that.

Three weeks later, we had a bye the second round.

We came back and played Canberra in Canberra in the wet down there.

Last year's minor premiers, and we had a great win as well.