Senior coach Luke Beveridge says his side is preparing for an arm wrestle against Richmond at the MCG on Saturday night.

Despite holding a three-goal lead at half-time in their last encounter, the Bulldogs succumbed to a 22-point defeat in round seven last season.

Beveridge said the challenge this time around will be ensuring they can combat a Tigers-surge.

“Last year, we’d won our first (six) games and they took up the challenge and sat us on our behinds,” the coach said at Friday morning’s press conference.

“We’ve had a couple of recent outings where we know what the Tigers are capable of when their backs are to the wall – there’s not many teams and clubs better. We’ve got to be ready for that.

“At the end of round two I mentioned we had some momentum going into last week’s game – our challenge will be to find that intensity that’s going to at least be able to match the Tiges at the start of the game, and be ready for an arm wrestle.”

Beveridge said another area of focus will be inside forward-50.

“As it is they’ve got seven, maybe eight talls if you include (Nathan) Broad who is 192cm, while we’re going in with five,” he said.

“On paper, there is a theoretical advantage in the air so we’ll need pressure on the footy and will need to have wise heads going inside our 50 as well, and making sure we’re finding our teammates in space to advantage.

“I think the challenge is more going to be for our medium small (forwards), and how we play that aerial part of the game.

“We need the boys to compete in the air and at least bring the ball to ground. I think Aaron and ‘Marra will do that reasonably well – I don’t anticipate that this Richmond backline is in any sort of state that we’ll rip them apart as there’s still some very, very good players down there.

“Hopefully we get enough supply to give ourselves a chance in this instance.”

The first bounce will be at 7.25pm AEST on Saturday night.