Footy Fix: Boring, brainless and utterly broken - it's time for Freo to find Plan B

I wrote last week that Fremantle, despite running over the top of Gold Coast, had been thoroughly worked out by the rest of the competition.

But it’s even worse than that: and their abject 49-point loss to a similarly spluttering Western Bulldogs, a margin that, if anything, flattered them, confirms it. The Dockers are broken.

We knew they lacked quality targets ahead of the ball. We knew their ball movement was cautious, unimaginative and dull, and good teams would work it out. We knew their last kick inside 50 was just about the least effective in the league.

Now, we know some more things, too. We know their backline, beset by more immediate pressure than at any point last season, cannot cope: after conceding zero triple-figure scores in 24 games in 2022, they’ve given up two in three weeks, and 90 in between to an inaccurate Suns.

The consequences have been frightening: the Dockers, having had about as easy a start to the year as any top-six side could have hoped for, are 2-4 with games against Brisbane, Sydney, Geelong and Melbourne in their next five. Unless something radically changes, they’ll be 3-8 at the mid-season bye.

Coaches often get a bum rap for the mistakes of their charges – no coach can do anything about some of the Dockers’ defensive half turnovers on Friday night – but Justin Longmuir deserves every bit of the criticism that will no doubt start coming his way.

The toast of the footy world in 2022, having established a defensive system the envy of the competition and developed an effective if unorthodox method around the ball, he has had no answer to the plans devised in the off-season to combat their success.

Missing pieces in the system haven’t helped. David Mundy’s cool composure and brilliant kicking inside 50 has been irreplaceable, and made Freo’s forward forays all the more impotent.

Blake Acres was tremendous last season as an outlet option for rebounding defenders: Ethan Hughes just doesn’t have the running power to play that role, plus he lacks the nous to get into sufficient space to be an option in transition. Acres averaged nearly six marks a game last year; Hughes has 15 after six rounds.

For all his faults, Rory Lobb was at least an obvious focal point who could be counted on for a couple of goals and a few contested marks per game. The Dockers’ army of smalls could predict where the ball was going most of the time, and rove at the ankles of Lobb and Matt Taberner.

Luke Jackson got his hands to plenty of balls on Friday night, but few stuck, and with Freo almost incapable of hitting a target inside 50, the Dogs were regularly able to flood back, get numbers around the contest, and escape. And with six and five marks respectively, Bailey Williams (who also managed three goals) and Oskar Baker were far more effective outlet options than Hughes (three marks).

The Bulldogs came to Optus Stadium with a plan: to get the ball forward from stoppages by any means necessary, and lock the ball in with a wave of pressure. The backs pressed high, almost to the edge of their attacking 50, with Alex Keath the defensive sweeper to mop up anything that got over the top and Ed Richards sacrificing his own game to mind Michael Frederick, the fastest Docker going the other way.

It meant repeat entries for much of the night, most obviously with 10 of the first 12 inside 50s going the Bulldogs’ way. A gargantuan 21 tackles inside 50 also told a tale: the Bulldogs crammed plenty of their own numbers into attack, which most teams are wary of, and backed their fast hands to find ways through the cluster.

Alex Pearce isn’t used to being pressured right to his own goal line like this, and it showed.

Or if the Dockers managed to extract, they’d hardly amount to anything more than a high, hopeful ball outside 50 to be mopped up by the Dogs at will.

29 of the Dockers’ 48 defensive 50 possession chains ended in a Bulldogs intercept, with the Dogs scoring 50 of their 118 points from them. Whether it was a simple kicking error from an Alex Pearce or a Corey Wagner, or just a long ball being reclaimed by the Dogs, the Freo defence couldn’t cope with repeat entries on the regular.

Only twice in 2022 did the Dockers concede more than the 60 inside 50s the Dogs piled up. That’s a disastrous number for a team like them – especially given they’d won the inside 50 count in four of their previous five games in 2023, for all the good it’s doing them.

But while the Bulldogs’ plan was sound, and effective, they were hardly if ever challenged on their main weakness: transition defending. The Bulldogs are so far and away the worst team at conceding scores from defensive 50 possession chains this year that it isn’t funny, and only part of preventing that came from their fierce pressure on the ball-carrier.

At quarter time, the Dockers had only played on from 16 per cent of their 29 marks, with the Dogs at more than double that. At three quarter time, they’d only used the corridor from 15 per cent of their rebound 50s. It tells the tale of boring, predictive, almost cowardly football – it’s so out of sync from the way Collingwood and St Kilda are playing, the way 2023 footy seems to be heading.

Fremantle players leave the field. (Photo by Will Russell/AFL Photos via Getty Images)

It wasn’t as if the Dockers didn’t have chances: the Bulldogs kicked six consecutive behinds to start the match, and especially early, could hardly hit the side of a barn door. There is no easier point to attack the middle – or in the immortal words of Dwayne Russell, go ‘straight down the spine’ – than from a kick-in.

Yet Freo’s plan seemed to be this: chip to the pocket, hold up, find there were no other options – or maybe one extra chip kick if they were lucky – and then the inevitable long ball up the line with only Sean Darcy as a genuine marking option.

It inevitably meant the ball hitting the ground; for the Dockers, who rank dead last in 2023 for average ground ball gets with 95 fewer than their opposition, that’s disastrous. Even worse, it’s manna from heaven for the Dogs, who love nothing more than packing numbers around the ball and getting into the clear with quick hands.

You can tell something from lack of numbers sometimes: where Luke Ryan had 25 kicks and 10 marks for Freo, Corey Wagner 14 kicks and Hayden Young 11, the Dogs’ main rebounders in Richards and Bailey Dale had just 16 touches apiece. The Dogs didn’t mess around in their backline: they either went long immediately, a more favourable strategy for them given their talls and quick hands at ground level, or switched to the open side and players in space.

Really, but for the Dogs’ woeful kicking in the first ten minutes, the match would have been gone already. As it happened, all that did was buy the Dockers time.

Speaking of Darcy, his role was another move that, in a better Freo, could have worked – his and Luke Jackson’s instruction was clearly to head forward at every opportunity, and force Tim English to defend. By quarter time, Darcy had two strong contested marks inside 50 with English nowhere in the picture, and booted the Dockers’ first of the game.

Darcy had five contested marks by half time – all but one were in one arc or another. He did nothing wrong, and played his part beautifully – but it meant he was either ahead of the ball or behind it when the Dockers bombed long to the wing. It made their plan around him all the more baffling.

This is where Longmuir comes in. Like last week, the Dockers looked to be far more aggressive in the final quarter – playing on, attacking the corridor, looking to move the ball fast. The problem was the Dogs running out the game far better than the Suns, and being better set up defensively to boot.

Sure enough, turnovers were created, heads dropped, and the Dogs reaped the rewards on the counter. A spread defence, caught off guard, gave up 16 marks inside 50 on the night – more than in any game last year, and following on from 14 of them in the first half against Gold Coast last week, a serious dilemma.

Making matters worse? The Dogs were the league’s worst team this year for marks inside 50 heading into Friday night, with just 43 from five games. Third worst? The Suns, with 46.

The Dogs averaged a mark inside 50 for every 3.75 entries on Friday night. In their two losses to Freo last year, they went at 6.11 and 5.89. This is a system collapsing before our eyes.

The Dockers only seem to be able to control the footy when they take marks down there – and even then, it’s only temporary. Teams aren’t allowing them to chip the ball forward and make incremental gains like they did last year – oppositions press a long way forward to deny them that outlet. And even when they do get clear, some of the exit kicking tonight was woeful; a sign of a team out of sorts if ever I’ve seen one.

The problems extend to around the ball, too. When it comes to stoppages, the Dockers still have their trick from last year – Caleb Serong and Darcy do the lion’s share of the bullocking and extracting work at ground level, then feed it out to Brayshaw or Will Brodie.

With 35 disposals (19 of them contested), Serong held up his end of the bargain – but Brodie seems well short of the dynamic player he was last year, and the introduction of Jaeger O’Meara has muddled things.

Since early-career knee injuries robbed him of his once explosive pace, O’Meara has always been an inside player – he had more clearances and contested possessions in 2022 than Brayshaw, and only Brodie and Serong of Dockers finished ahead of him.

Freo don’t need another player like him, and the result is their midfield is now just that fraction slower. They don’t burst through the front of stoppages with last season’s vigour, O’Meara’s presence around the ball has been disastrous for Brodie’s form, and too often the Dockers are being caught out with too many players at the coalface and not enough a handball’s length away.

This last quarter Bulldogs goal is a perfect example: O’Meara, matched up on Marcus Bontempelli, loses touch and is unable to lay a hand on the most influential player on the ground. It means that, instead of cutting off his handball options, Serong and Jackson are forced to pressure him directly, sucked into the ball. If Bont can get his hands free, Serong’s opponent, Adam Treloar, is free and in space; sure enough, he does.

Throw in a pitiful tackle attempt from Hughes – I’m willing to bet Acres at least clings to something – and the game is lost.

It meant that, while the Dockers ended up matching the Dogs for clearances and beating them from centre bounces, it amounted for nought. Worse still, when the Bulldogs won it, they were more easily able to break into space than in either match last year, where the Freo web meant hacking it was their only way forward: for Jamarra Ugle-Hagan, too fast for Alex Pearce, it was perfect, hence his six marks to half time and career-high ten for the match, most on the lead.

From an attacking point of view, the Bulldogs have, for 18 months, been as easy as any team in the game to score on out of the centre. But times where Brayshaw or Brodie or Serong were able to break clear from congestion instead of having to hack long under pressure to an outgunned forward line were few and far between.

The Dockers had a good thing going last year, but O’Meara in Mundy’s place hasn’t worked in any respect. It’s made their engine one-paced, unimaginative, and more like everybody else’s – a boring midfield for a boring team.

To give the Dogs the credit they’re due, they were excellent. This is still a side with a number of deficiencies, but they’ve gotten better in the last month at covering them. I wrote after Round 2 that Luke Beveridge needed to at least break even in his next four games to hold onto his job: they’ve gone 3-1, with a creditable loss on the road to Port Adelaide in between, and leave Perth with a handy percentage buffer.

To watch Bontempelli leave stoppages is to watch everything Fremantle lack: he seems to have all the time in the world as he lopes into space and drives the ball forward into dangerous positions, or failing that, executes a flawless handball under heavy pressure to a free teammate, the Dockers having gravitated towards him out of fear as much as respect.

He plucked two contested marks inside 50, regularly sprinted back into defence to help out his backs, gathered 31 disposals, had a team high 528 metres gained, went at 80 per cent disposal efficiency, had eight clearances and kicked two goals. No midfielder this season has had a more complete match.

And just like late against the Power last week, the midfield was severely diminished whenever he needed a spell – the Dockers’ best run, midway through the third quarter, came when Bontempelli was absent for consecutive centre bounces.

A lot of the above, minus the marking, could be said of Adam Treloar, who played a Brayshaw-esque outside role as the main outlet when the Dogs were under pressure. Liberatore, Macrae and Bontempelli swarmed the ball, while Treloar stayed a handball off ready to receive and run. It was a page out of the Dockers’ own copybook, and with 35 touches, 468 metres gained and two goals, Treloar played it beautifully.

Around them, Jack Macrae equalled the club record with 14 clearances, most of them sharp handballs out to Bontempelli, while Tom Liberatore had seven of his own.

Down back, Liam Jones, paying scant regard to Jye Amiss – I doubt he’d have been able to do the same facing Lobb – took intercept marks by the boatload, including four in a wonderful third term to repel the Dockers at every turn. In attack, Ugle-Hagan and Lobb presented well all night, led into space, and were rewarded handsomely. With a collective haul of 1.6 for the night, only inaccuracy prevented one or both from a night out.

English recovered from Darcy’s early bath to get better and better – Freo were able to prevent the intercept marks he’s renowned for, with English not taking a single one all night; but there are many other strings to his bow. No ruckman in the game is cleaner below his knees, and with another 20 disposals, 34 hitouts and a crafty snapping goal at a crucial stage, he managed to outwork Darcy and Jackson both.

But for Freo, it’s time for something drastic to change, and it starts with the coach. Freo’s first two inside 50s of the game, around the Bulldogs’ 12, led to two goals, both sourced from defensive 50. Both featured fast ball movement, one caused by an errant kick forcing quick thinking, the other from a 50 metre penalty. And both caught the Dogs’ defence scrambled.

Against a team like the Dogs – and like the Suns last week – who press up high to trap the ball in their attacking half, going fast can work. Yes, teams will block up the corridor, as the Dogs did effectively all night, but other sides have been able to find a way against them, and until the last quarter, Fremantle hardly even tried.

A play in the third quarter, where they went with speed straight up the middle, caught the Dogs on the hop, and finished with a Michael Frederick goal, was how they should have played the whole game. But nope: straight after this, they went back to targeting the wings.

Defensively, they need a dasher, someone with speed to complement the kicking skills of Young, the intercepting of Ryan and the power of Pearce and Brennan Cox. Brandon Walker could be it, but he spends most of his time guarding the dangerous smalls; Izak Rankine a fortnight ago, Cody Weightman on Friday night. It’s time to free him up, and give him a licence, as Ross Lyon does for Nasiah Wanganeen-Milera and Bradley Hill, to run and gun.

Around the ball, a circuit-breaker is needed; someone fast who can spread away from stoppages on the outside, to complement the added grunt of O’Meara. Someone like Lachie Schultz, who can win the hard ball, mostly uses it well, and is crafty to boot. Even if only in bursts, it would at least be something new.

Fremantle right now are playing the same way they did last year – just with a slightly worse batch of players for the job. Now that teams have worked them out, and are punishing them for it, it’s time for Plan B.

How effective that is will determine not just their future this year, but also whether Longmuir, Coach of the Year in 2022 in the eyes of many, keeps his job beyond his current contract. It’s that serious.