Thursday night’s Elimination Final demolition of the West Coast Eagles is the best team performance that Club legend Doug Hawkins has ever seen, he told SEN on Friday.
Hawkins, one of the Bulldogs' greatest ever players, said he'd never seen a better team performance than the one the Dogs produced on Thursday night in Perth.
"This has to be the best win against the odds in the club's history, in my opinion," Hawkins said.
"Being at home, 50,000 Sandgropers ... as we all know, that environment is very uncomfortable.
"This is something that the footy club will remember for a long, long time and who knows what they can do now," he said.
The Bulldogs fielded a side with an average of just 83 games experience on Thursday, the youngest group of the eight sides to qualify for the finals.
Adam Simpson's team were the fourth most experienced side going into September with an average of 118 games, while next week’s opponent, Hawthorn, took 151 games of experience per player into their Qualifying Final on Friday night.
But experience isn’t everything, and Hawkins said the Dogs’ best performances have come on the back of the obvious bond that exists among the team.
"The thing that I love about this group, that Luke Beveridge has brought to the team, is that they just do their job and there's not a real lot of frills and spills and all that sort of stuff," he said.
"They've just got blokes that work for each other and do their job for each other."
Smells like team spirit
Club legend Doug Hawkins says Thursday's win was one of the best team efforts he's seen.