Fremantle coach Justin Longmuir has delivered a scathing assessment of his team’s biggest loss of the season against Greater Western Sydney on the road, describing it as “ordinary in all facets”.
The Dockers went down by a whopping 70 points at Giants Stadium on the back of a goalless opening term, with back-to-back losses since the bye.
Longmuir said he would take a deeper look into their preparation after dishing up a performance that was “not good enough”.
“We were ordinary in all facets,” Longmuir said.
“They were very good and we couldn’t match them.
“When you dish up a performance like that, you have to look at your preparation.
“We need to look at our week. We didn’t get the contest right all over the ground, all aspects.
“We got beaten up and that’s not good enough.
“We were all pretty flat in the rooms after that.
“We need to have a look at ourselves as a coaching group and make sure we’re preparing our players the best and giving them the right messages.”
After four wins in a row heading into the bye, Longmuir felt they had played nothing like that hot form since the week off.
“We’re playing nothing like we were before the bye,” he said.
“Our clearance wasn’t where we needed it to be today, centre-bounce clearances were 15-3 at one stage which costs you field position.
“We didn’t have the same urgency in the contest and didn’t have the same urgency in defence.”
Longmuir also addressed his team’s horror run of first quarters, losing 16 of their past 17.
“There’s been some disappointing first quarters but there’s also been some first quarters where we feel like we got off to a decent start and it’s just been the back-end of the quarter that’s let us down or we haven’t made the most of our opportunities.
“Today it was comprehensive. It wasn’t just the first quarter… the contest wasn’t good enough and the way we defended our front half was poor.
“Then when we got some looks on ball-movement chains, we just didn’t execute the basics.”
Longmuir said the absence of hamstrung No.1 ruck Sean Darcy had played a role in Freo’s form slump.
Darcy is a chance to return from injury against Essendon on Saturday night at Optus Stadium, with speedster Michael Frederick (ankle) likely to come back in after he was a late out for the Giants clash.
“It plays a role, not only do we lose one of the competition’s best rucks, even though Jacko (Luke Jackson) is doing a good job in there, it’s unbalanced our forward-line as well,” Longmuir said.
“We haven’t got Jacko as a forward which unbalances that a little bit and puts even more pressure on Jye (Amiss) and Josh (Treacy) down there and you have to drag JT out of there because he needs to be second ruck.”