Go the doggies, into the semi-finals!

The Western Bulldogs have progressed to the semi-finals of the Wizard Home Loans Cup after scoring a thrilling 11-point win over 2004 pre-season premiers St Kilda at Launceston’s
Aurora Stadium on Friday night.

Rodney Eade’s Dogs had the lead for most of the night, and were able to hold out the pressing Saints to triumph 2.10.7 (85) to 1.9.11 (74). They now meet either Carlton or Melbourne in next week’s semi-final.

Yes, I know that yet again, in the second half, the opposition was allowed to claw back (into the lead this time). But if they can keep pulling off the win, I’ve decided I don’t care.

Game highlight: Farren Ray kicking a massive ’super-goal’ (such a dumb name. super-goal that is, not Farren) at the end of the 3^rd put the Doggies back in front, followed up with the first goal of the 4^th to galvanise the lead.

Dogs see off the Swans

It was a successful return to the coaches’ box for Rodney Eade on Saturday as the Western Bulldogs advanced to the quarter finals of the Wizard Home Loans Cup but it might be his former apprentice Paul Roos who will go home the happier man.

In what was the first meeting as coaches between Eade and the man who replaced him as coach of Sydney halfway through the 2002 season, the Bulldogs won 1.11.15 (90) to 0.11.4 (70) after breaking the game open in the third quarter.

In fine Bulldogs tradition, leading by 9 points at half-time (low score due to bad kicking, not lack of opportunities), they took the lead to 40 in the 3rd quarter & then let Sydney back to within 16 points in the 4^th.

Why oh why can’t we hold on in the last quarter? If Sydney didn’t have Barry Hall, Stuart Maxfield, Paul Williams, Jason Ball, Michael O’Loughlin, Jared Crouch, Jason Saddington, Ben Mathews and Tadgh Kennelly all out, we would have been stuffed.

On a more positive note, Ryan Griffen looks to be the player to watch this season. A rookie with a good opening game & a solid history.

Being an AFL mad Victorian (is there any other kind?) stuck up in Sydney, I get precious little news about ALF unless it’s the swannies playing. And seeing as my poor doggies aren’t exactly top of the ladder at the moment, I can’t remember the last time they were mentioned in the news. So all my news has to come from the ALF site (and a few sporting blogs).

Long story short, I’ve scraped the Bulldogs news site to generate an RSS feed*of all the news items. If you have Feed Demon, or some other aggregator that understands the feed:// protocol just click on this link: feed://feeds.slaven.net.au/westernbulldogs.rss, otherwise copy this link into your aggregator: http://feeds.slaven.net.au/westernbulldogs.rss.

If you don’t have an aggregator I highly recommend Nick Bradbury’s Feed Demon. And if you get it from here, you help me out too!

And for those poor un-enlightened souls who don’t support the Bulldogs, if you ask me nicely I might be persuaded to give your team a feed too. Bribery works too.

* If you don’t know what RSS is, I’ve got a brief intro to the topic.

After 9 straight losses, the Bulldogs have pulled off a brilliant victory against the Kangaroos at Telstra Dome to give Matthew Croft and Simon Garlick a winning send off for the last match of their careers.

The doggies built a decent lead in the 1^st half, scoring five unanswered goals in the 1^st quarter. However at the start of the 3^rd, they did their usual fall-away-while-ahead trick, letting the Kangaroos get to within 2 points after leading by 19. But this time they pulled back, kicking 8 in a row to seal the match.

Garlick & Croft providided a large part of the recovery

Garlick started a run of eight straight goals, slamming one through from a metre out after receiving a handball from a quick thinking Brad Johnson. Croft, the other swansong player of the evening, kicked three in four minutes in the middle of the Dogs’ streak; snapping one through and marking strongly in the goal-square on three other occasions.

It was 18 minutes of pure joy for the long-suffering Bulldogs supporters, who have endured a couple of difficult seasons with the team at the bottom of the ladder and miles from those preliminary finals of the 1990s.

The only trouble is that this sort of intensity & pressure seems to have come from wanting to give Garlick & Croft a good send off, when this should be the standard for the whole season.