Brad Scott fronted the media after Saturday night's defeat to the Western Bulldogs.

Scott pointed to poor tackling execution and the Dogs' sheer depth as big contributors in the heavy loss, with the Senior Coach also conceding that the inflated margin largely came from the side's attempt to implement a more attacking brand after half-time.

The talking points out of round 10 as the Bombers quickly look to reset for Dreamtime at the 'G next week:

Execution v. effort

They (the Bulldogs) were exceptional across the board in terms of team performance and equally as good as they were, we were poor.

Right at the start of the game, (we had) some opportunities missed going forward, but then I think they kicked their first three goals from broken tackles and that was a bit of a theme for the night.

Tackling statistics, I think they came out roughly even throughout the night, and our pressure numbers were very good, but probably as they should be, given we lost ground ball by 20-odd.

We tackled at 40 per cent, they tackled at 70 per cent. Even when we did tackle them, they were able to support the contest really well and get the ball out, so that all compounds into numbers like 1000 metres difference from stoppage, which obviously compounds inside 50 differential.

Somewhat ironically, in a big loss like that, some of the important things we needed to get done tonight, we actually did – McKay on Naughton, Setterfield on Bontempelli. If you said at the start of the night that we'd managed those two things, you'd think, well, that's a pretty good start.

We were well aware of their strengths and as I said, it was a bit like trying to get rid of mice under the blanket there for a while, because if 'Bont' doesn’t get you, ‘Libba’ gets you, Richards gets you, Dale gets you. You know, they're a good team.

The second half

I mean, the margin is the margin, but we never went into a game saving mode (of) ‘let's just get beaten by less’.

We tried to attack the game in the back half and that cost us on rebound as well. When you're losing the contest and probably being outworked to the contest, and as we've spoken about, when it became a one-on-one, four-v-four, five-v-four contest, they won and got us on rebound.

We definitely made the margin worse by trying to attack, but I mean, at half-time, I’m not interested in trying to hold up as best as we could, we wanted to go back and really use it as an opportunity to play against a really good team and reset the scoreboard in our own mind and attack them.

We turned the ball over a lot trying to attack and we have to tidy that part of the game up.

There's obviously a gap between where they are right now and where we are, even though I think we’ve taken some steps forward in the last four-to-six weeks, we clearly took a step back tonight.

We’ve never lost sight of where we're at, ever. I mean, we've got we've got a lot of steps forward (to go) to match it with the better teams in the competition.

I don't want to want to use that (lack of experience) as an excuse, they beat us around the ball. Bailey Dale has the ball a lot, but (has) almost 30 handball receives because they're winning the ball and giving it to him.

We had a couple of plans for him, clearly both of them didn't work and then we went to play an even-numbered forward line, try and attack him and that didn't work either.

I think it's a really good lesson for us that we need to be better with ball in hand and (at) absorbing their pressure.

That’s where we aspire to be - I make no apologies for trying to attack the game, rather than just trying to hold up and not get beaten by a big margin.

Now, we got beaten by a bigger margin because we did that, but we've got to use this as an opportunity to practice against the best teams to bridge the gap to where we want to be.

Our running numbers are as high as they’ve been this year, our pressure was really high, our tackle numbers are really high, it's the execution of those things that weren't at the level they needed to be.