BRENDAN McCartney denies the Western Bulldogs have gone backwards this season, but admits his side has not improved in some areas.
After going down to GWS in a six-point thriller on Sunday, the Dogs fell one win short of their eight victories from last year – but finished one spot higher on the ladder in 14th.
Losing to the Giants for the first time in stalwart Daniel Giansiracusa's last game was a bitterly disappointing end for McCartney's men, but he didn't believe the Bulldogs had taken a backward step this campaign.
"No, there's some areas of our game though that we clearly haven't improved to the level we would've liked," he said.
"Some areas of the ground we would've liked to have seen some improvement and that hasn't happened.
"But at the same time we have invested and are really getting the benefits now and seeing the benefits of investing game time into some really talented young players who have really good hearts and good minds and are passionate about helping us become a better club.
"We were already planning to sit down and acknowledge that we all have to keep learning, getting better (before the Giants loss).
"We'll get better, we will. It mightn't look like it tonight, there'll be a lot of summaries running around and opinions and emotional reactions to what was dished up tonight as a club, but we were going to do that anyway.
"We were going to make good decisions like we have the last few years, keep building our playing stocks, keep looking at how we play.
"And we'll get better, we will, we will get better, we will get better, we have to."
McCartney rued the way his side found a way to make mistakes and said "we even invented a few new ones" against GWS.
He admitted the Bulldogs have been on a downward spiral since their round 18 loss to Essendon.
The Dogs' solitary win in the last six games came against wooden-spoon winner St Kilda.
"We haven't trained all that well … tonight probably puts a bit of a dint in it to," McCartney said.
"It's one game, but it would've been nice to finish with a better performance."
A lack of key forwards clearly remains the Bulldogs' biggest problem and McCartney said the club would put a big emphasis on that area during the trade and draft period.
"We quite clearly need to find some way to take more marks of the contested variety inside forward 50," he said.
"We'll keep looking at ways to create a forward line that's fluent, that's got chemistry.
"We've introduced some more young players in there this year that have all shown in bursts what they're capable of.
"We'll keep looking, we're entering a really competitive part of the year now.
"There's 10 clubs on the lookout for talent and we're one of them and we'll be at work at 10 in the morning.
"There's a lot of determined, tough, competitive people in our footy club and what mightn't look great tonight is not what we're going to be.
"We'll fight our way out of this and we're going to get better."
