Despite going down by 16-points to league-leaders North Melbourne on Friday night, the Western Bulldogs did a lot right according to senior coach Luke Beveridge.

Speaking to westernbulldogs.com.au in the rooms post match, midfielder Jack Macrae said Beveridge had encouraged his players to go into the upcoming eight day break feeling positive because ‘we did a lot right against a really good team.’

It’s not hard to see where.

The Bulldogs won the contested possession count by 14, the clearances by 13 and the inside 50 entries by ten, but it was on the scoreboard where they failed to have an impact despite restricting their opponents to 61 points below their season average.

“I think they defended really well but if you go over the tape and look at our inside 50s and how we didn’t use our numbers, and how we kicked to them, and their smart drop offs, there’s some definite room for improvement,” Beveridge told SEN’s Crunch Time on Saturday morning.

“It’s a little bit of a broken record internally because we’re frustrated with that week-to-week at the moment – [but] if it’s the last piece of the puzzle then we’re going ok.”

With Jake Stringer well held by Scott Thompson, the Dogs managed just the six goals, five from midfielders, Beveridge rued his side’s missed opportunities going forward.

“We know that we’re a little bit compromised personnel wise at the moment so week-to-week we need a really good spread of goal kickers to win games, we can’t rely on one or two to kick bags, and it never should be that way anyway.

“We’re on a journey, but we’re really happy with the way we’re defending but we definitely go into games looking to score three figures and at the moment our strike rate on that isn’t so good.”

Asked if he’d be looking at including another tall alongside Stringer next week against the Crows, Beveridge said that the make-up of the forward line would continue to evolve as the season goes on.

“We went into the year with a young group understanding the cap on the rotations, and the four interchange, because they’d have to spend more time and bigger chunks on the ground that we needed to be picking players that can go the distance.

“We’ve said earlier that we’ll probably play a combination of Tommy Boyd, Roughy and Tommy Campbell or Jack Redpath, Tom Campbell and Jordan Roughead at different points, and maybe Will [Minson] comes into that mix.

“We’ll look at that.”