His team certainly didn't.

"Bevo, he doesn't raise his voice but when he's fuming, you know he's fuming," said Caleb Daniel, one of the Bulldogs' better players on the night.

"It's hard to see him disappointed because he's like a father figure to all of us.

"We haven't won against the Cats in a little while so we really wanted to come out here and give it a real hot crack."

The Western Bulldogs coach had just watched his team's loss to Geelong in a performance that he was obviously struggling to come to terms with what went wrong. The Bulldogs gave up a run of six-straight goals in the second term and matched that with their own run before being swamped by the Cats in the closing stages to lose by 23 points.

"What was that show years ago?" a drained Beveridge asked the reporters at his post-match press conference. "It was a mystery show looking for aliens and things that were a bit obscure.

"Well, for us [the underlying problem] is a little bit obscure. It's a bit of a X-file at the moment so we'll continual to explore what we need."

Beveridge said the underlying issue was more than just playing through a game.

"It's a bit more than that. [There are] just a few who let us down unfortunately when we had the upper hand," he said. "Our players always try their guts out so it's not necessarily a four-quarters thing. It's an intensity level.

"They [Geelong] obviously came with a pretty healthy and stealth mindset, so it felt like we matched them for most of the game but, yeah, it's quite disappointing."

Among the most damning aspects of the loss, was a number of what Beveridge described as "horrendous" decisions, including when Travis Cloke gave away a 50-metre free kick for backchat which led to the Cats snapping the Bulldogs third-quarter streak.

"I'm not going to hang any of our players our to dry. I'll never do that," Beveridge said of the Cloke incident.

"The vast majority of our group we're doing everything they could to win the game and unfortunately we need our 22 to have a really consistent and even contribution.

"We're almost there. We had the upper hand and the arm wrestle was in our favour we should have gone on with it."

"... They [Geelong] are a good team and they're on top of their game. They really rely heavily on their very best players and we didn't curb their influence enough on and off the field so we take [responsibility] for that."

The Bulldogs have now lost tight games on the road to Fremantle, Greater Western Sydney, West Coast and the Cats. However, Beveridge said he was confident that the team would turn things around.

"We're still right in the thick of it but the very best teams win the tight games," Beveridge said. "Last year ... we had eight games away from home and we won six of them.

"We've had three interstate and one down here [this season] and we've lost all four and as much as the margins have been reasonably tight, we're really really disappointed.

"We're still trying to work ourselves out, finding the spirit and the endeavour that we've had a while. We just haven't got enough to take us to where we've been right at this point in time, but I believe we'll find it."

In one bright spot for the Bulldogs, Mitch Wallis had a successful return from a bad broken leg which he suffered last season.

"It's great to see Mitchy out there. Seeing him under packs and feeding out handballs, it's a sight to see and to kick that goal and the boys get around him, it's pretty special," Daniel said.