The Western Bulldogs made five changes and turned to Adam Treloar as they tried to steady a season that had drifted after a bright start, when they face Narrm at Marvel Stadium at 3.15pm AEST on Sunday. Luke Cleary, Lachie Jaques, Jordan Croft and James O'Donnell also came in for the Dogs, who entered the round at 5-5 after winning their first four games and then losing form over the past month.

Out went Louis Emmett, Oskar Baker, Sam Davidson, Bailey Williams and Jedd Busslinger, while Narrm rested Latrelle Pickett and welcomed back Caleb Windsor. The matchup carried extra weight because the Bulldogs had also been hit by an injury crisis and were coming off a loss to the Blues, leaving them needing a response against one of the competition's hottest sides.

Narrm arrived with a 7-3 record and had stacked up wins over Hawthorn, Gold Coast and Brisbane before Round 11, a run that had lifted confidence and sharpened the sense that they were playing with newfound freedom and flair. The Dogs, by contrast, were searching for stability and had been forced to reshuffle again as they tried to keep their season from slipping further.

That made the contest at Marvel less about style than survival for the Bulldogs, even if the Demons had been making the most of their form. The pressure on the home side was obvious in the selection moves, and the margin for error was thin against a Narrm team that had already shown it could beat finals contenders.

In the end, the Dogs held off the Demons in a thriller, a result that mattered because it gave the Western Bulldogs a much-needed lift at a point when their season could have gone either way. The challenge now is whether one hard-fought win can arrest a slide that had been building for weeks, or whether it was only a brief pause in a tougher stretch still to come.