Canterbury Bulldogs head coach Cameron Ciraldo has revealed his side will learn key lessons out of their thrashing at the hands of the Brisbane Broncos on Thursday evening.
After a six wins and zero losses start to the 2025 NRL season, Ciraldo's Canterbury side found themselves conceding more points than minutes played during much of the first half on Thursday evening, heading into the halftime break 34-0 down.
The Bulldogs defence was shaky early, and their discipline equally bad with three players sent to the sin bin throughout the game.
Ciraldo said he wants his side to learn a number of lessons from the contest.
"Honestly, I thought we prepared great and came here ready to play, but an error and a try early, then it was a comedy of errors. We will walk away with plenty of lessons tonight," the coach said.
"Number one, we aren't good enough to be beaten at the laws of the game like that, number two, we aren't good enough to play as individuals. When we played as a team in the second half, we started to look like the Bulldogs again, and number three we never give up.
"I know teams get ahead on the scoreboard like that and don't come out with the same intensity which is probably the story of the Broncos tonight, but I thought the way we attacked the second half, we scored 18 points and left a couple out there as well.
"I'm proud of the second half, but filthy at the first half."
The Bulldogs, who have been strong at both ends of the park during the season to date, came away from the game with something out of the second half, but captain Stephen Crichton said he didn't believe his side were 'off'.
"I didn't feel like we were off. We just made it hard on ourselves the first 20 minutes. The first half we only had 30 per cent of the ball so we were defending a lot, and if you gift possession to a quality team like the Broncos, they are going to make you pay," Crichton said.
"The effort was still there. We came out in the second half and kind of turned it around there, but there are a lot of lessons we can take. I don't feel like we went out there with the wrong energy, we just missed the mark on a few things."
Sitili Tupouniua, Matt Burton and Josh Curran are all facing suspensions out of the game where three Bulldogs were sin binned, but Ciraldo said it was a 'frustrating' game rather than taking aim at the decision-making around the sin bins specifically.
"I don't know," Ciraldo said on the sin bins.
"There was so much going on tonight, there was no flow to the game. It was one of those games that was probably hard to watch to be honest.
"Everything that could get penalised got penalised, everything got picked up and it was a ball-ache to watch for me so I'm sure everyone else felt the same.
"I put that down to us trying to hard. We made an error, gave up a try early on. A couple of high tackles on the back of that. We have been pretty disciplined for long periods so we will fix that pretty quickly."
The Bulldogs face the Gold Coast Titans next weekend at Magic Round.
