Everybody in the rugby league world has been trying to get to the bottom of what has happened to the Bulldogs this season<\/a>, with their win over Penrith being the only real highlight in an otherwise dismal follow-up to last year\u2019s breakout campaign. <\/p>\n While the Matt Burton-Lachlan Galvin halves partnership has been the subject of much scrutiny along with the rest of the spine, Gould said on his Six Tackles With Gus podcast on Wednesday that the Bulldogs have been left behind by the NRL\u2019s increase in set restarts.<\/p>\n \u201cIf I had one theory about the whole thing, and I\u2019m not the football coach, I\u2019m not telling the coach or anything, but we built this team over the last couple of years built on old DNA of defence and fitness and resilience,\u201d Gould said.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd we haven\u2019t been a big point-scoring team for the last two years either, we\u2019ve been winning games three tries to one or four tries to two and we\u2019ve really backed our defence, and in the game today it\u2019s hard to do that. It just hasn\u2019t suited us.<\/p>\n \u201cYou look at the point scores on the weekend, I think it was 38-16, 32-10, 46-18, 34-8, 36-12, 42-12, 28-6, all the scoreboards look the same, one team seems to get a run on and runs away on the scoreboard and the other team can\u2019t seem to cope because of a lack of possession and what have you, now that\u2019s a trend that we\u2019ve seen over the last month in particular in rugby league and we\u2019re on the wrong end of that.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s got us rethinking everything about our operation but right at the moment we need to support the players and we need to support the coaches and see if we can get some good performances and some confidence back into their football.\u201d<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/1779017096_680_poster-fallback.png\"\/)
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