Phil Gould

I mean, I think we've come a long, long way in three or four years.

I think the last two years depicted that.

And I think from a club set up and having the bones of what is a professional organisation going forward,

are now very much in place.

We've got good people in good positions.

We've got a strategy going forward and we've got good recruitment people that are out working very, very hard in other countries and up in Queensland and New South Wales country.

And it puts a lot of pressure on our relocation program and bringing kids in.

And we take that responsibility very, very seriously too, because not all the kids we bring in are going to make it and they're not going to be NRL players.

So there's education and welfare things that go around that.

I think in the ground that we've made over the last three or four years has been tremendous.

I think we were rewarded with a couple of really good years last year.

Now football gods have said we've got a new test for you.

We're going to get you to lose five in a row and see how you handle that.

20 and 21 was before I got here.

They were the COVID years.

I think Bulldogs won six games over the course of the two years.

It was kind of COVID and it was kind of like fans weren't going to games anyway.

talking like that but now they were before this year and now it's that that almost that curse of expectation you saw you walked into belmore in those days too and you saw what it was like you saw what the facilities are like you felt what the morale was like in that organization it was broken there's no risk that it was broken and defeated in a lot of respects all right takes time to turn that around we turned the top 30 around in two years i don't think anyone would have ever been attempted that they'll have been able to do it

And in an environment where you're a team running last and you're struggling, it's not easy to go out and recruit 30 players that want to come for your club and risk their careers and come and get involved in your vision for what the club might be.

But we found 30 players who came in and put their shoulder to the wheel and played for each other.