![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/r1549129_1296x1296_1-1.jpg&w=130&h=130&scale=crop&location=center.jpeg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nCiraldo alluded to the fact that the post-mortem of the Dogs’ campaign, where they led at the half-point of the year before winning just two of their final six regular season games, would centre on his spine changes.<\/p>\n
The Bulldogs coach axed regular halfback Toby Sexton for mid-season recruit Lachlan Galvin as well as demoting first-choice hooker Reed Mahoney to a bench role in the latter half of 2025.<\/p>\n
Canterbury finished third after 27 rounds and suffered successive losses to Melbourne and four-time defending premiers Penrith on Sunday in a 46-26 defeat.<\/p>\n
Robert Cianflone\/Getty Images<\/p>\n
“I wouldn’t change a thing… This is all part of the journey,” Ciraldo said.<\/p>\n
“There’s been some tough times this year and our guys have had to deal with a lot more scrutiny than some other places and the way they’ve stuck together and handled it and kept building a really strong culture – we’re incredibly proud.<\/p>\n
“Our season was weird, we were coming first but we had a couple of byes there that helped us sit in that position.<\/p>\n
“We played a lot of top quality opposition the second half of the year. This is the first year our club had to go through the Origin period with a lot of players involved, so that’s another part of our learning.<\/p>\n
“We had injuries at different times which didn’t help us as well.<\/p>\n
“I know what the headlines will be, but internally we’re really clear on how this season panned out, what was good, what we need to do better and today’s a massive lesson in that as well.”<\/p>\n
Ciraldo reserved particular praise for Galvin, who helped the Dogs launch a second-half fightback on Sunday along with Bailey Hayward.<\/p>\n
Hooker Hayward is the man who has ousted North Queensland-bound Mahoney as the club’s first-choice No. 9.<\/p>\n
“We don’t need any vindication or validation of what we’re doing,” Ciraldo said.<\/p>\n
“We know what we’re doing and we’re really confident in what we’re doing, but for Lachie to go out there today and attack the game the way he did, I thought he was one of our top players.<\/p>\n
“I thought Bailey Hayward was one of our top players out there when he got on the field.<\/p>\n
“For those two guys in particular to come out and be two of our best on the big stage under the most pressure says a lot about their character in terms of how much crap they had to deal with this week and external opinions.<\/p>\n
“Those two guys are tough, tough characters. They’re going to play a massive part in our future.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A defiant Cameron Ciraldo claims he wouldn’t change anything about Canterbury’s NRL campaign after a late season fade-out…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":160286,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[568],"tags":[64,63,761,762,158,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-160285","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nrl","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-national-rugby-league","11":"tag-nationalrugbyleague","12":"tag-nrl","13":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160285","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=160285"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160285\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/160286"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=160285"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=160285"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=160285"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}