Western Bulldogs defender Taylor Duryea says the playing group will head into Saturday night’s clash against Carlton with strong self-belief.
The Dogs will be striving for four straight wins when they meet the Blues at Marvel Stadium, which Duryea believes will be a fiery outfit given their recent performances.
“We’re feeling confident – you never need a team to be motivated more than normal to make the task any tougher, but obviously Carlton have copped it a fair bit by the media in recent weeks so we know they’re going to be pretty fired up,” Duryea told RSN on Thursday morning.
“Needless to say they’re a good side – they’ve got great players across the board and will make life tough for us, but we believe we can get it done.”
After a poor start to the season, the Bulldogs have turned things around to win five of their past six games.
Duryea said despite finding some consistency, they still have plenty to improve on.
“It was a far from ideal start - we don’t like surprises in the game, and we almost surprised ourselves with what we dished up. It wasn’t really to the standard we wanted,” he said.
“We want to be doing the little things well that make the good teams good – so we sort of simplified things, and brought it back to just playing the game we were familiar with.
“We’re not saying that we’re playing our best footy – but it’s good enough to be winning games and building.
“We know we’re far from where we need to be and even from the top sides who are playing some really efficient footy – we aspire to get there but feel we are on the right track.
“There’s definitely been some personnel and positional changes, but that’s been complimented by what the rest of the team does.
“Essentially we just didn’t apply enough pressure and were too easy to play against.
“If you put those things in place to make ourselves a harder team to play against – more fierce, more physical – all of the other things begin to fall into place.”
The Bulldogs will face the Blues in front of a capacity crowd this Saturday night from 7.30pm AEST.
