White sees light at end of tunnel for Bulldogs

SOUTH Fremantle vice-captain Craig White is confident that the challenging times the Bulldogs are currently experiencing so far in 2013 will only serve to hold the club in good stead down the track.

While South Fremantle has managed just two wins from its first 11 games of the season, there is without question signs that a strong side for the future is being built under coach Paul Hasleby.

Young players like Nick Borovac, Justin Monaco, Tim Kelly, Alistair Gillespie and Jacob Martinez have all shown exciting signs with Dylan Ross, Nick Borovac, Jarrad Winter, Haiden Schloithe and Sean Tighe among the players to have taken their games to another level as well.

While the wins haven’t been there so far this season for the Bulldogs as they would have liked, White can without question see plenty of good signs for the future.

"Obviously at the start of the season we had aspirations to play in the finals and it hasn’t gone that way so far, but we have been able to blood a lot of young players who seem to be showing glimpses that they are going to be good players in the future," White said.

"Looking through our list, the average age is about 21 or 22, and we are starting to get games into these guys. It's not going to happen overnight, but I think down the track we are going to have a good side in years to come.

"We've been unlucky in a number of games and we've probably fallen away in others due to a little bit of inexperience, but we take the positives out of those games. Paul really hones in on that mid-week and tries to keep it as positive as he can for the young group. We're not that far away and hopefully a bit of luck in the back end of the year and we can sneak off the bottom of the ladder."

One player at South Fremantle who has had an outstanding first half of the 2013 season is ruckman Sean Tighe.

White didn’t get to play with the big man last year in his first season with the Bulldogs after crossing from VFL club Werribee because he was the playing-coach at the Balmain Dockers in Sydney as he took a break from living in WA for the first time and playing at South Fremantle for the first time in more than a decade.

The colts, reserves and league premiership star who is nearing 150 games at the Bulldogs to earn life membership has played with outstanding ruckmen before in particular Jaymie Graham, and has been tremendously impressed by Tighe already.

"He has been a massive influence on the group. He is probably a little bit undersized as a ruckman, but the effort that he puts in week in and week out is enormous," he said.

"He pretty much does it alone and he has carried the ruck duties very well. He was probably unlucky to miss out on the state side, but he will figure pretty high in our best and fairest."

Prior to last week's bye, South Fremantle had a run of four games since the state game break that brought about impressive wins over Peel and East Fremantle, but disappointing losses to Claremont and Subiaco.

The break gave the players the chance to freshen up last weekend with some like White choosing to stick around and watch this week's opponent Swan Districts play Subiaco on Saturday, and then head down to Shark Park on Sunday while some took the chance to have a complete break from football.

"There were a couple of training sessions before the weekend and then Paul gave us the weekend off which was good as a mental freshen up more than anything," White said.

"It's been a pretty tough year for the boys, so it was good to have the weekend off. A few of the boys went away and did a bit of fishing up north, and a few guys hung around town and watched a bit of footy to keep their finger on the pulse."

By Chris Pike