West Coast Eagles disappointed after Bulldogs final loss – Josh Kennedy

One bad night at the office and it’s season over.

It just happens quickly at this time of the year and after months of hard work and planning you come away with nothing to show for it.

Unfortunately, that’s the harsh reality of AFL football.

You work hard to create opportunities, but if you don’t capitalise on those chances then another season slips through the fingers.

Last night against the Western Bulldogs in an elimination final, for whatever reason, we did not play at our best and they were great.

The end result was that they advanced to the second week of the finals series and we put 2016 behind us and start looking ahead.

It really is a case of mixed emotions.

We had a pretty good year, winning 16 games and that would usually earn your team a top four spot, but fort the first time in history that wasn’t the case this year.

That put us in the position of playing a sudden death final and it comes down to what happens on the night.

And we simply weren’t good enough.

Before we move onto next year, we’ll analyse what went wrong, learn from it and try to improve next season.

The suddenness of a season ending is tough to deal with.

We certainly weren’t thinking about that going into the game against the Dogs, but we did know it was going to be a challenge.

The Bulldogs play a manic brand of football, they had five quality players coming back into their team and we knew we would need to be at our best to beat them.

Disappointingly, we could not do that.

Now we will go on our break, think about the areas we need to address, both individually and collectively, and come back in November ready to have another crack it.

On behalf of the boys, to all the West Coast fans out there, thanks for the great support.

Sorry we couldn’t get the job done, but we’ll be back after a break doing everything we can to get another shot at it in 2017.