The Western Bulldogs have been hit with another devastating injury blow just one week after losing key young talent Sam Darcy to a season-ending ACL tear, with star spearhead Aaron Naughton carried off the field on a stretcher during Thursday night’s lopsided 66-point loss to Sydney at Melbourne’s Marvel Stadium.\n\nNaughton was stretchered from the ground in the third quarter after a hard landing when he jumped to take a contested mark, leaving fans and teammates unsettled as medical teams attended to him on the pitch. Speaking after the match, Bulldogs head coach Luke Beveridge confirmed that the star forward was cleared to leave the stadium with the team after the incident, and will undergo full diagnostic scans on Friday to clarify the extent of his injury.\n\nBeveridge told reporters that initial assessments point to a soft tissue strain in the side of Naughton’s neck, adding that a major positive sign from early checks is that the 24-year-old showed no signs of concussion. “He’s going to go home now and he’ll have his neck looked at tomorrow, we’ll get back to you on that,” Beveridge said. “He appears to have strained down that side of his neck from the incident. The bright side is there’s no sign of concussion but we’ll have to report in once we get something more definitive from a scan.”\n\nThe latest injury setback comes on the heels of last week’s devastating loss of Sam Darcy, who was ruled out for the rest of the AFL season after tearing his anterior cruciate ligament during the Bulldogs’ heavy defeat to Geelong. When asked about the string of personnel blows hitting the club, Beveridge acknowledged that the team has faced significant challenges in recent weeks, both on and off the field, during their current three-match losing streak.\n\nBeveridge pulled no punches in his assessment of Thursday’s performance, admitting that Sydney outmatched the Bulldogs across almost every area of the ground after a promising opening from his side. “We started off the game in good fashion and the things we spoke about beforehand came to the fore,” he said. “As the night went on, we probably needed our more experienced players really influencing the game, obviously Marcus Bontempelli was (influential) but we didn’t have enough elsewhere.”\n\nThe coach noted that while the club’s younger players showed glimpses of improvement as the match progressed, Sydney’s intensity, speed and spread across the ground proved too much for his undermanned side. The Swans’ pressure forced the Bulldogs into repeated uncharacteristic errors, turning the contest ugly in the final stages. “Fifteen back-half turnovers in that last quarter we gave up, that’s just extraordinary, that’s skill, that’s composure, it’s fatigue, it’s many things,” Beveridge said. “It turned really, really ugly for us. We have to work through that together and remain optimistic.”\n\nBeveridge admitted that these repeated late-game turnovers created the open opportunities that allowed Sydney key forward Charlie Curnow to boot a match-winning seven goals, adding that Curnow’s elite one-on-one performance was too much for the Bulldogs’ defensive unit to contain. “Curnow was quite exceptional one-on-one, none of our backs could stop him from taking those contested marks which is disappointing,” he said. “We think we should be better than that but he had obviously a very influential game.”\n\nWith the Bulldogs now stuck in a three-game losing skid, the side has barely a week to reset and fix their structural errors before they face a stern test next week, hosting an in-form Fremantle side that is pushing hard for a top-four position this season.
AFL 2026: Western Bulldog star Aaron Naughton will get a neck scan on Friday after his big fall
