Canterbury 'as united as we've been for a long time': Andrew Hill

After a disruptive 2018, the Bulldogs are as tightly bonded as they have been in a long time, according to CEO Andrew Hill.

The club has released its impressive 2019 season launch video, which arrived via a very nice piece of synergy when club chair Lynne Anderson bumped into Liverpool FC CEO Peter Moore.

Of course, Anderson's famous father Peter "Bullfrog" Moore was a club legend and the family is something of a dynasty in Belmore.

"The video was an opportunity to tell our story again, who we are and who we represent, and it was a nice piece of history that we can all draw from," Hill told NRL.com.

"Interestingly our chair Lynne Anderson was at a conference last year and ran into Peter Moore, the CEO of Liverpool football club.

"With the synergies from Peter's name it was like two worlds aligning. That chance meeting was where a lot of the conversations started to come from, our synergies with Liverpool.

"Our video is who we are but it was also aligned to what Liverpool have recently done as well. We looked at some of their work and thought, brilliant, let's put our own piece together."

Hill was also bullish on the work the club had done to repair its standing and its playing roster after a tough 2018 in which they had to let some popular players depart in order to get the books back in order and return to being a competitive side as quickly as possible.

He said nobody at the club was the slightest bit fazed about being widely tipped for the wooden spoon in 2019.

"It was clear that we're going through a period where we had to make some tough decisions in order for us to take more control and we've done that from a football point of view, made some changes in our junior league to bring junior participants closer to our district club and recently announced an agreement with Country Rugby League on the mid-north coast," he said.

"We're working hard to re-establish the core values of our football club. They've always been there but they lost a bit of focus. Everything we're doing is to ensure people know the values of our club. Football-wise it's a style of play, establishing that whenever anyone plays against the Bulldogs they know it's going to be a tough game.

"We've got a young enthusiastic team, we're as united as we've been for a long time, we're not worried what people say about us."

Hill wasn't about to make any grand guarantees about the club playing finals this year or next but said he was certain the environment being created was conducive to success.

We had to make some tough decisions in order for us to take more control.

Andrew Hill

The club appears to have managed its salary cap squeeze about as well as could possibly have been expected; some popular big-name and big-dollar players have gone but a few value buys and some possible future stars have replaced them. It means the club will be an active force in the player recruitment market much sooner than they otherwise would have been.

"We wanted to be open and transparent as much as we could to our supporter base and we were able to do that within reason last year," Hill said.

"Those decisions were made by the club and will continue to be made that put us in the best position.

"There's still some work to do but those decisions have been able to bring forward our position to be a little more active, we're still not quite there yet but as a football committee we are looking at who's available."

In the short term, Hill said it was an exciting time for the club given some of the young players who emerged into and succeeded in first grade last season.

"The opportunity now is to continue that pathway, to continue those opportunities, and to allow those players their opportunity to put on that Bulldogs jersey and allow them to take us forward," he added.

"We have a solid platform, a quality forward pack, we're in a really competitive position. The coach [Dean Pay] has to make some tough decisions every week around who is going to make the final 17 and that's a great opportunity for the club.

"We're just busting to play."