Following a challenging night at Marvel Stadium where the Bombers faced a 93-point defeat against the Western Bulldogs, Senior Coach Brad Scott addressed the media in his post-match press conference.

Scott acknowledged the Bulldogs' dominance with a four-quarter effort resulting in the total margin but emphasized the exposure of an ‘undermanned, undersized, vulnerable’ defence due to injuries.

Scott openly discussed the team's struggles but stressed the importance of responding to adversity, urging the team to focus on improvement and getting better through difficult times. 

Scott on... recapping the game, staying positive

The margin's obvious on the scoreboard, but the margins between contests are thinner than people probably appreciate and they just got us bit by bit over four quarters.

(Ridley) we could probably least afford to lose in defence we lost and, you know, it exposed a pretty undermanned, undersized, vulnerable defence.

Again, we got it inside 50 almost enough to be able to compete but there's challenges all over the ground for us at the moment.

It's a difficult situation where we're in but you can choose which way you respond, you can make excuses, you can identify all the things that aren't working for us at the moment, the things going against us or the things that the players can't control, like availability, or we can focus on improvement and getting better through adversity.

That's really the only way you do get better. When things are going really well, you get a little bit of reward for effort and you get a little bit of feedback on what's working well, but real improvement comes through difficult times and no one enjoys it.

It's hard, but when you do hard things, you improve as long as your attitude is right, and that's where we've got to spend a lot of our time just making sure that our morale stays as high as it can be, and we keep competing because we're not going to concede.

Scott on… challenges

That's a bit of the challenge for us at the moment, just the frustration when we're in a contest and we have a tackle broken or we can't quite break a tackle, and they're able to do exactly that in reverse.

I think we can do a lot right structurally and still get beaten, and that’s the frustration for the players and coaching staff at the moment, but, you know, frustration doesn't get you anywhere. You've got to channel that and try and focus on improvement, and that's what we'll do.

I think it's a hard public message to say we're happy with anything when you have a margin like that, but I still see effort, we’re still getting beaten in some contests by quality players and by quality teams who do as good a job as anyone in the competition at exposing team vulnerabilities.

Never at any stage did I think we gave up, we kept fighting, even though the margin was getting away from us.

Scott on… Ridley

It's incredibly frustrating, devastating, all the words that you can possibly think of to describe it, but as repetitive as it sounds, there are plenty of examples through the competition of players who've just had to fight setback after setback after setback, and when you can come through it, you come through it a more resilient player, and a more resilient person.

We just rate him so highly, he’s so important to our Club and we'll support him through whatever it is. 

Scott on… the final five weeks of the season, Lachie Blakiston’s effort

It is a privilege to play AFL football and to be a part of it. We never take anything for granted.

I sort of get that people could be forgiven for thinking, well, what's there to be gained? For us, there's an enormous amount to be gained, like an enormous amount, because we're playing some players who wouldn't get an opportunity if we weren't in this situation in terms of availability and with that comes opportunity for them to get better and test themselves against really good players.

I mean, Naughton and Darcy were clearly very dominant today, but Lachie Blakiston, I don't think there's anyone outside our Club who would have thought that a mid-season rookie pick, who was drafted as a ruckman, would be playing at full back – he hasn't looked out of place.

As I said at the start, the hard things, the hard times, I'm watching really closely to see how tight the group stays, how much fight they've got, because if you can fight and you can fight and you can go through the hard times, it builds character and resilience for when we can execute better, and we can get better as a team. Those intangibles will be really important to us.

So they're the things that we're really looking to build for the back half of the year, and it's not easy, it's extremely hard, but, you know, when you do hard things, you generally get better provided your attitude’s right.

Scott on… Merrett

I think he's doing an exceptional job of leading our group, but he's also a human being who gets frustrated, but I can assure you, he's leading our team extremely well.

I think it's also underrated how much pressure is going onto certain elements of our team. You know, we're asking a lot of a lot of players and know the irony is, if we're dominating and Zach's just playing his part, it's actually easier for him.

This is really hard for him right now. So he's a bit of an example of the, it's frustrating, it's hard and you don't enjoy it at the time, but if you have the attitude that these hard times make you better in the long term, there's something to hang your hat on.