WESTERN Bulldog Daniel Cross says he is more than happy to continue with his new challenge as a shutdown player if it helps the side's young midfield develop.

The 28-year-old has been moved away from his traditional hard-working inside midfielder role with the emerging Callan Ward now playing regular football and the arrival of players like Tom Liberatore and Mitch Wallis.

Cross says he is enjoying his new responsibility, even when it relegates him to one spot like it did last week when he was tasked with playing as a defensive forward against St Kilda's Sam Fisher.

"With where we're at the moment, and for pure balance of the side, the coaches have needed me to play some real tight shutdown roles, especially over the last few weeks," he told westernbulldogs.com.au this week.

"Really, the whole season I've usually had someone to lock down on, whether it be at the start of the game or midway through.

"It's something I really enjoy. If those others can try and do my role, it frees me up for the coaches to play me with a different role and try and take out some of the best players on the other side."

Cross said he was prepared to do whatever it took for the Bulldogs to succeed; even if he was stuck at one end of the field and unable to unleash his powerful endurance tank.

"We thought Fisher might have gone into the centre; he's been playing in there a fair bit, and then when he went back I'd go with him as well," he said.

"He just seemed to stay down back the whole night so it seemed to be working reasonably well.

"I'm definitely not frustrated; the frustration is that you want to be able to use your strengths and mine are being able to run, and run out games and try and grind my opponents down and try and win the hard ball as well.

"It was different for me but being a team sport, you have to sacrifice your game for the benefit of the team and I understand that now being here for 10, 11 years.

"It's not all about you. It's about the team. I would have done anything for the team to win last week so that was in the back of my mind."

Cross is part of the Dogs' leadership group that is headed by captain Matthew Boyd and vice captains Daniel Giansiracusa and Adam Cooney.

He said any suggestion the side had lacked leadership in its first post-Brad Johnson season was way off the mark, and the group was doing all it could to pull the Dogs out of their mid-season slump.

"We don't judge ourselves on what other people think," he said.

"I know it's easy for them to judge what happens out on the field but if they came in here every single week to see what we were actually doing to try and get things right, then I reckon they'd be quite amazed.

"It's a real learning curve for us as well, to take a stand out on the field, and more and more we are doing that, we are learning every single week how to do that better."

He admitted the group was inexperienced in comparison to the strong leadership structures that had stood the Dogs in good stead in recent years but was confident in the progress they were making together.

"Leadership, to some guys, comes very naturally but to some guys it's something you have to work on as well," he said.

"I certainly don't care what people say on the outside. We're more than comfortable with the way we're heading.

"Our culture has been bashed around a fair bit by people from the outside as well but little do they know what happens inside these four walls."