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Ask Cameron Ciraldo about everything taking place at his Bulldogs right now, and he’ll walk you from one room to the next here inside Belmore HQ where, over and over, that same phrase is continually writ large. “Yeah, all over our walls,” he says, pointing up to yet another of those creeds which, painted in Canterbury-Bankstown blue, screams Club First, Team Second, Individual Third. A mantra too, the coach stresses, “passed down over time” within these walls and now something “we focus on every day”.

Yet know this Bulldogs revolution, it’s about more too. Has to be. Understanding even last year, as Ciraldo sat high in that Olympic Park grandstand, Homebush, watching his side get its arse handed back by Newcastle – final score, 66-blot -- said phrase was already on the walls, right? Already ingrained too, or as best as it could be, in a team whose disastrous 2023 campaign saw them branded the NRL’s worst defenders and plenty more – thanks, specifically, to those backpage headlines involving the likes of Andrew Davey, Tevita Pangai Jnr, even Jackson Topine’s ongoing $4 million lawsuit.



Yet that embarrassment against the Knights, it was the day on which everything changed. “A dark day,” is how Ciraldo remembers it now, before quickly adding how it also “magnified everything we needed to sort out”. Kicked back this particular Thursday in a chair once held by the likes of Warren Ryan, Phil Gould, even the late, great Steve Folkes, Ciraldo is talkin.

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