Western Bulldogs fans will have some great memories of encounters with the West Coast Eagles. Since 1987, the year the Eagles joined what was then still the VFL, the sides have crossed swords 61 times. Although the Bulldogs are currently on the wrong side of the win-loss ledger (23-37 with one draw), some of those wins count among the most significant in the club’s history.

The very first match between the Dogs and Eagles was played in June 1987 at Western Oval. Although it was West Coast’s inaugural league season, they came to Footscray having already established themselves as a formidable club, having won six of 10 matches and sitting in the top four. The Bulldogs were a game behind, and their poor percentage had them in ninth place.

Against the expectations of many, the Dogs, coached by Mick Malthouse, burst out of the blocks to set up a five-goal quarter time lead. The Eagles did not lie down, clawing their way back to level the scores by three-quarter time. But the Dogs rose to the challenge, with a five-goal-to-two final term taking them to an impressive 22-point win. Steve ‘Super’ MacPherson played a dominant role, collecting 21 disposals and kicking six goals, while Brian Royal’s 27 touches and three goals earned him three Brownlow votes.

Malthouse was still coaching when the Bulldogs travelled to Perth to take on West Coast at Subiaco eight years later. This time, however, he was at the helm of the Eagles, who were now reigning premiers having won flags in 1992 and 1994 under the guidance of the former Footscray coach.

With Chris Grant out of the Bulldogs’ line-up because of a hamstring injury, the Eagles went into the game as raging favourites. Against all odds, the Bulldogs – who had never won in Perth – played a magnificent brand of footy to cause one of the upsets of the season.

Mark Hunter was one of the stars of the win, despite what some might describe as a less than optimal preparation – a night out at Perth’s Gloucester Park trots! Hunter had 31 touches, while Tony Liberatore had 37 and Scott Wynd dominated in the ruck.

Two years later in Round 6, 1997, the team – now officially known as the Western Bulldogs – repeated the dose across town to record their first ever win at the WACA. Under first-year coach Terry Wallace the Dogs broke the game open in the third quarter and fought off a last-quarter challenge to win by 14 points, with Grant (23 disposals and a goal), Simon Minton-Connell (five goals) and Scott West (28 possessions) playing starring roles.

Later that season the teams met again in a match few who were there will forget. With the Bulldogs having shifted its gameday home to Princes Park while the new Docklands Stadium was being built, it was announced they would play one final match – against West Coast – at the famous Whitten Oval ground.

A total of 27,604 – the vast majority of them home fans – crammed into the Dogs’ spiritual home to bid the venue farewell, at the same time hoping to see the sixth-placed Dogs knock off the fifth-placed Eagles. In wintry weather (a West Footscray Saturday afternoon tradition) the Bulldogs held sway throughout to give Whitten Oval a fitting send-off, winning by 18 points in an appropriately dour affair. Grant, Luke Darcy and Scott West all collected Brownlow votes for their roles in the win.

Just over a year later the Western Bulldogs had established themselves as one of the AFL’s best teams. Having fallen just short of a Grand Final berth in 1997, the Dogs backed up with an even better 1998 season, finishing second to earn a home final against West Coast.

The Bulldogs went into the match as favourites, but perhaps did so carrying mental scars of their previous match against West Coast. In that game back in May, the Dogs had surrendered a 48-point quarter-time lead to go down by 13 points.

Now, three months later at the MCG, the Bulldogs had another strong first term, but this time there would be no letting up. They led by 23 points at quarter time and extended the gap in each of the remaining terms to record a thumping 70-point win – the club’s biggest ever in a final until it was surpassed in the Dogs’ 2021 preliminary final thrashing of Port Adelaide.

Familiar names dominated in the win, with Minton-Connell kicking five goals and Grant four to go with his 21 possessions, while José Romero (27 disposals) was also outstanding.

The Dogs had another important win over the Eagles late in 2005, Rodney Eade’s first season as coach of the club. At the MCG in Round 19 the Bulldogs hosted West Coast, who sat atop the ladder, three games clear of second-placed Adelaide. By contrast the Dogs sat in 12^th place, a game plus percentage out of the top eight.

Against all expectations Eade’s men dominated from the start. With Grant (six goals) again outstanding the Dogs defeated the West Coast by 43 points, the Eagles’ biggest loss of the season to date.  The Bulldogs ultimately narrowly missed out on finals that year, but the win gave fans a taste of relative success that was to come over the next few years under Eade, including preliminary finals berths in 2008, 2009 and 2010.

Over the past decade, the Western Bulldogs have recorded several wins over the Eagles which have come to define the men’s team in the Luke Beveridge coaching era. The first of those came in Beveridge’s inaugural outing as coach in Round 1, 2015.

Beveridge had joined the Bulldogs after an off-season of great upheaval, and there were external doubts about whether the Dogs would be competitive in 2015. From the outset it was clear that no such doubts existed internally. In their first match under Bevo the Dogs matched it with the Eagles throughout the afternoon and then dominated the final 20 minutes to turn a five-point deficit into a 10-point win.

Leading from the front were Marcus Bontempelli, Lin Jong and Jack Macrae, and kicking the goal to give the Dogs the lead late in the game was new recruit Tom Boyd. Boyd would go on to play a pivotal role in the breaking of a 62-year premiership drought.

The breaking of that drought was the result of a magical month of football that began in early September 2016, when the Bulldogs travelled to Perth to take on West Coast in an elimination final.

Against the Eagles on their own turf surrounded by 50,000 rabid home fans, few gave the Bulldogs a chance. The odds became longer still when West Coast kicked the first two goals of the match, but from that moment on, the Doggies took control of the match, largely silencing the huge army of Eagles fans.

The Dogs kicked the next four to lead by 13 points at quarter time and, against all expectations, increased their lead in every term to win by 47 points. Caleb Daniel and Luke Dahlhaus were dominant, while forward Clay Smith was a one-man wrecking ball, laying a game-high nine tackles (equal with Dahlhaus).

That victory set in concrete the famous ‘Why not us?’ mantra that carried the Bulldogs to one of the greatest premiership victories in VFL/AFL history 23 days later.

Perhaps less remembered among the many fine victories the Dogs have recorded under Beveridge is the 101-point drubbing of West Coast in Perth in Round 11, 2022. It’s fair to say the Eagles were ravaged by injury at the time and were sitting at the bottom of the ladder. However, the ruthlessness shown by the Dogs that afternoon highlights an important aspect of the Bulldogs’ brand in the Bevo era: recording wins by huge margins.

Such wins play a big role in building percentage, which can prove critical when the dust settles at the end of the home-and-away rounds. Such was the case in 2022 when the Bulldogs scraped into the eight ahead of Carlton by just 0.6 percentage points.

Of the 12 wins by 100 points or more the Bulldogs have recorded in a century of VFL/AFL footy, four have come in 11 seasons under Beveridge. Over that same period Bevo’s Bulldogs have won 10 games by a margin of 90 points or more. That’s an incredible 42 per cent of the Dogs’ 90+ point wins since 1925.

With Bevo’s boys already boasting the third best percentage in the league ahead of the start of Round 23, Dogs fans will be happy enough to see their team come away with a win of any margin this weekend, along with a clean bill of health.