{"id":687525,"date":"2026-05-22T14:57:11","date_gmt":"2026-05-22T14:57:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/687525\/"},"modified":"2026-05-22T14:57:11","modified_gmt":"2026-05-22T14:57:11","slug":"nrl-2026-bulldogs-coach-cameron-ciraldo-hits-out-at-journalists-in-press-conference-player-rumours-matt-burton-future-contract","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/687525\/","title":{"rendered":"NRL 2026: Bulldogs coach Cameron Ciraldo hits out at journalists in press conference, player rumours, Matt Burton future, contract"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bulldogs coach Cameron Ciraldo has hit out at \u201cbulls*** rumours\u201d and \u201cunfair\u201d criticism after the club snapped a five-game losing streak with a hard-fought 30-20 win over the Storm<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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The Bulldogs have been in the headlines for all the wrong reasons<\/a> in recent weeks and while the majority of that had to do with their on-field performances, it was general manager of football Phil Gould who created the most noise this week.<\/p>\n

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Gould went on the media offensive as he appeared both on his own podcast and spoke to Bulldogs legend James Graham in an attempt to provide clarity to the club\u2019s fans. <\/p>\n

Instead, he only seemed to create more confusion<\/a> \u2014 particularly surrounding the future of halfback Lachlan Galvin after admitting the 20-year-old is not viewed as their long-term No.7<\/a>.<\/p>\n

That immediately cast doubt over Matt Burton\u2019s future, but the Bulldogs five-eighth hardly looked distracted on Friday as he had what Ciraldo called his \u201cbest game of the year\u201d.<\/p>\n

Speaking to reporters following the win over the Storm, Ciraldo admitted that as much as he consistently tells his playing group to block out the external noise it is easier said than done. <\/p>\n

And for the Bulldogs coach, a lot of it has been \u201cbulls***\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo be honest as much as we say to try and block it out I think it\u2019s hard to ignore all of it,\u201d Ciraldo said.<\/p>\n

\u201cNot just the outside noise, the rumours that circulate and the bulls*** that gets made up. <\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m really proud of this group that they just kept turning up and trusting in what we were doing but I felt a lot for them that they\u2019ve had to go through that as well. <\/p>\n

\u201cBut I think this five weeks we\u2019ve been through will be a blessing in disguise. You find out a lot about people. What I\u2019ve found out about our group of players and staff is we\u2019ve got a really tough group. <\/p>\n

\u201cSome of the stuff that\u2019s been said about some of our players and our staff is totally unfair and I\u2019m just glad we got a performance tonight that we can enjoy and hopefully some people get a lot of credit for that.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Dogs produce ‘season-saving’ comeback | 01:24<\/p>\n

When pressed on what specific rumours he was referring to, Ciraldo pointed to talk of players being \u201con the other\u201d and \u201cgetting sold there\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cBurton\u2019s one that gets tossed up a lot doesn\u2019t he?\u201d added Ciraldo.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo it\u2019s really disappointed when you\u2019re going through a losing streak and people decide to make up rumours about your players. It\u2019s hard for us to defend them and then some people are copping a lot of unfair criticism as well. <\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m really proud of our coaching staff in how connected they\u2019ve stayed together and how much they\u2019ve trusted in what we\u2019re doing and how hard they\u2019ve been working.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ciraldo conceded at times the outside noise has become \u201cquite debilitating\u201d for the club\u2019s younger players and while the scrutiny is quite often the loudest, he also wants the team to not get too caught up in the external validation after wins either. <\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s probably the hardest thing around this club is when we do lose a game there\u2019s a lot of outside noise so for us to manage that and try and keep the boys off their phones and off TV because our wins are extreme, our wins are awesome, we get so much energy out of them but our losses are even more extreme and even when we perform well and lose the outside noise becomes quite debilitating for young guys,\u201d Ciraldo said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat we\u2019ve done really well I think is try and focus on the opinions that matter within our four walls and that\u2019s going to be really important after a really good win tonight that we don\u2019t listen to what\u2019s being said on the outside and we focus on what we did well tonight, which was a lot and what we can do better, which is still a bit as well.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bellamy fuming after poor 2nd half | 07:02<\/p>\n

Ciraldo said he is \u201clearning all the time\u201d how to best handle the immense spotlight that is always going to follow the Bulldogs around as one of the biggest brands in the NRL. <\/p>\n

\u201cBut what I understood about the last five weeks is we\u2019ve been away from home a lot,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve had the least amount of home games over this opening ten games so we were really excited to get home tonight and get a lot of energy from our fans and I think that was important for us.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey got right behind us, even when we were getting those decisions that we had to challenge \u2014 every single time.\u201d<\/p>\n

That was one other consistent theme from Friday\u2019s press conference. While relieved to get the win, Ciraldo was clearly quite frustrated with a few calls that went against the Bulldogs.<\/p>\n

When two defining moments from young forward Jack Underhill were brought up, Ciraldo went out of his way to also point out how \u201cvery brave\u201d it was to request a captain\u2019s challenge be made in his second game of NRL.<\/p>\n

\u201cActually there were a few captain\u2019s challenges,\u201d Ciraldo added. <\/p>\n

\u201cThank God for that… because that would have made it hard. <\/p>\n

\u201c… We won three of them. We haven\u2019t been getting many decisions going our way, but we\u2019ve been playing not very well at all. So you can\u2019t say much about it, but tonight there were still a number of decisions that went against us. I\u2019m just really grateful for captain\u2019s challenges.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Bulldogs coach Cameron Ciraldo has hit out at \u201cbulls*** rumours\u201d and \u201cunfair\u201d criticism after the club snapped a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":687526,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[568],"tags":[64,63,761,762,158,85],"class_list":["post-687525","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nrl","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-national-rugby-league","tag-nationalrugbyleague","tag-nrl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/687525","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=687525"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/687525\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/687526"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=687525"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=687525"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=687525"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}