Senior Coach Justin Longmuir is demanding consistency of effort and performance from his players in 2022, and he also wants to see consistency in the players’ mindsets after contrasting victories against West Coast this pre-season.
Fremantle backed up a 97-point practice match victory followed by a 13-point win at Optus Stadium in the AAMI Community Series, in what was a much more even contest.
Longmuir felt Sunday’s clash was the more realistic result, crediting West Coast for their work in the contest while putting some of his own players on notice.
“I thought West Coast really upped their intensity around the ball, their pressure, hunt and work rate from contest to contest,” Longmuir said.
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“I thought we had some good performances, we had some players who were really strong in the contest and were up for the fight and then a few that thought it was going to be as easy as last week.
“We knew and we prepared really strongly for West Coast to bring what they brought today. It’s something we need to keep working at, I thought some of the talk after last week’s game… I thought people were getting ahead of themselves.
“Hopefully, our players didn’t get ahead of themselves, it was a pre-season game and an interesting concept coming up against the same team twice in two weeks.
“We knew and we prepared really strongly for West Coast to bring that effort and I thought we didn’t handle that as well as we could’ve as a team and as a collective.
“I said to the players after the game that we’ve got a lot of work to do and in some sense, I’d rather that sort of contest tonight than us winning easily, so it will set us up well for round one.”
Fremantle came out of the game with two injury concerns, with Rory Lobb copping some friendly fire from Sean Darcy while Nathan Wilson appearing to hurt his shoulder in a contest.
Longmuir said Wilson would require scans while Lobb only came off the field as a precaution.
“Nathan Wilson got that hit to the shoulder, so he’s pretty sore and sorry for himself, so we’ll just have to get it scanned,” Longmuir said.
“(Lobb was) more a bit of soreness. We’re pretty confident he’ll be right. He wanted to come back on and it’s just one of those things when we had a tall sitting on the bench, we wanted no risk.”
