In the second instalment of Peter Gordon’s exclusive interview with Bulldogs TV the incoming President emphasises the Club’s priority to further inject ‘muscle’ into the Dogs' football department.

“Well I think that it’s very clear that there’s a very direct correlation between the amount of money that you invest in your ‘off-team’ football resources - the best teams in the competition show that,” Gordon says in the interview.

Watch incoming President Peter Gordon discuss football department spending on the media player above in part two of his exclusive interview series with BulldogsTV.

“So it’s been a priority of mine to make sure that we are making available more money to invest in those resources. We need to do it productively and we’ve done it in an interesting way in this current phase, to have a guy like Ben Graham who has experience at the top level not just in the AFL but the NFL - I think he is probably one of the few guys to have ever played in both an AFL Grand Final and a SuperBowl.

“He’s played at the New York Jets, the Detroit Lions, the Arizona Cardinals  - to have that sort of global experience beyond the AFL. I think this adds a dimension to us. To get Graham Lowe with his experience in Scottish Rugby. To get Andy Barnett together with, of course, the experience that we have added with Jason McCartney last year and James Fantasia over the last several years.

“What that diverse mixture of international experience in other codes has  given us, I think, is a matrix or a template of football experience which backs up Macca, which backs up Rohan Smith, Chris Maple - all of the other specialist coaches - and gives us the opportunity to educate and develop this young talent in a very broad way. Hopefully it will accelerate their education and their development as young footballers.

“That’s the plan and I want to continue to look at ways to invest in the football department in creative and lateral ways but I also want to work with Simon Garlick and with the management of the Club generally to ensure continuous improvement in everything that we do.

“…whilst we do take a more powerful football department into the competition than we’ve ever have before we need to be realistic about the fact that each and every one of our competitors is improving at, at least the same rate.

“So we need to raise as much as we can - and we need to spend it as judiciously and productively as we can. But I am excited by the challenge - we have always been a club that has defied expectations, that has risen when other people didn’t expect us to.

“Those days are going to come again. They may come sooner than most people think - if we all work together and work as hard as we can and try as hard as we can”.  

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