Phil Gould has declared the Bulldogs are “rethinking everything about our operation” after being caught out by the NRL’s new rule changes.
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Everybody in the rugby league world has been trying to get to the bottom of what has happened to the Bulldogs this season, with their win over Penrith being the only real highlight in an otherwise dismal follow-up to last year’s breakout campaign.
While the Matt Burton-Lachlan Galvin halves partnership has been the subject of much scrutiny along with the rest of the spine, Gould said on his Six Tackles With Gus podcast on Wednesday that the Bulldogs have been left behind by the NRL’s increase in set restarts.
“If I had one theory about the whole thing, and I’m not the football coach, I’m not telling the coach or anything, but we built this team over the last couple of years built on old DNA of defence and fitness and resilience,” Gould said.
“And we haven’t been a big point-scoring team for the last two years either, we’ve been winning games three tries to one or four tries to two and we’ve really backed our defence, and in the game today it’s hard to do that. It just hasn’t suited us.
“You look at the point scores on the weekend, I think it was 38-16, 32-10, 46-18, 34-8, 36-12, 42-12, 28-6, all the scoreboards look the same, one team seems to get a run on and runs away on the scoreboard and the other team can’t seem to cope because of a lack of possession and what have you, now that’s a trend that we’ve seen over the last month in particular in rugby league and we’re on the wrong end of that.
“It’s got us rethinking everything about our operation but right at the moment we need to support the players and we need to support the coaches and see if we can get some good performances and some confidence back into their football.”
The Bulldogs have now won just four of their last 16 games going back to Round 24 in 2025, while they have scored more than 18 points just five times in those 16 games.
Code Sports journalist Brent Read said it was “remarkable” that the club is “looking into everything” so soon after finishing inside the top four.
“How can you regress so far in such a short space of time? Clearly they’ve got something completely wrong,” he added on NRL 360.
While the new rules have certainly not helped the Bulldogs, it alone is not the reason for the club’s sudden slide.
Read’s colleague Michael Carayannis argued that Cameron Ciraldo’s side “overachieved massively” and that as a result some level of regression was to be expected.
Now, at the same time no one is arguing that this drastic a downturn should be simply waved off.
Gould certainly isn’t doing that, revealing earlier in the week on 100% Footy that there are “internally a number of reasons” for why the club is struggling.
Read described those comments as “cryptic” and suggested it only does the Bulldogs more harm unless Gould comes out and clarifies what exact problems he is referencing.
“It would be nice if he explained it more because all that does is create more conjecture and more speculation around what the actual internal problems are,” Read said.
“I don’t think anyone outside of Gus and maybe Cam Ciraldo know what he’s talking about.”
For NRL Hall of Fame inductee Gorden Tallis, however, there isn’t any need for a thorough investigation into what has happened at the Bulldogs.
Instead, he believes the Bulldogs may have been too quick to divert away from what was working last year when they dumped Toby Sexton and Reed Mahoney, even if they don’t want to admit it.
“Deep down, they won’t come out and put their hand up (but) last year when they were going good, it wasn’t broken,” Tallis said.
“They thought they would fix it and maybe in hindsight it hasn’t, so they’ve just got to go back to the drawing board and put some more puzzle pieces in. That’s as deep as it gets.”
Originally published as Gus reveals ‘remarkable’ theory on Bulldogs’ shock slide… and drops ‘cryptic’ clue
