Fremantle’s dismal away record has resulted in it finishing further down the ladder than it would have hoped, and Harvey wants to see that stop.
“On the road’s always the hardest for us,” Harvey said during the club’s AFL Community Camp in South Africa this week.
“I think we won two out of 10 [interstate games] last year, so there’ll be a real sort of concentrated effort on that this year.
“We may change a few things from a travel point of view.”
Harvey, taking the reins for his first full season in 2008 after replacing Chris Connolly in round 16 last year, said averting a similar win-loss record away from Subiaco Oval was paramount to Freo’s success.
“It’s always been two days [that we’ve travelled] out but over the preseason comp we may trial a couple of games where we only go the day before the game just to see how the players respond to that,” he said.
Harvey hopes to see a more accountable Fremantle side in 2008 after admitting the men in purple underachieved last year, when they missed the finals.
“There’s some distinctive things that we’ve done over preseason that you can already see we’ve gained some benefit out of … now it’s got to go on [the] field,” he said.
“We’ve all got different philosophies as coaches and I’ve changed it marginally.
“There’s probably a few other areas that maybe we haven’t looked at, so we’ve tried to go right into things and we’ve had a lot of strategy meetings over the last six or eight weeks and now it gets time to put into practice.
“I think we were the third highest-scoring team in the competition last year, so there’s other areas that we think we need to fix up to try to get our win-loss [ratio] up around 70 to 80 per cent.”
Fremantle has gained some extra experience with the recruitment of the likes of former Bombers Mark Johnson and Kepler Bradley although, while he knows he boasts an experienced list, Harvey won’t necessarily be playing all his elder statesmen early on.
Freo meets Carlton in Pretoria this Saturday in an exhibition match before taking on West Coast in its NAB Cup opener – something the coach said all his players were itching to get at.
“It’s a part of the fixture and it’s a great opportunity for coaches to explore their list and find out exactly where players can fit into the team,” he said of the NAB Cup.
“We play West Coast first up which, it doesn’t matter what sort of game it is, it’ll be intense and it’ll be a game, not that you target, but that you’d like to come through and win and then you get some sort of belief about what you’ve done over [the] preseason.
“I’d be keen to experiment and try a few young kids throughout the course [of the game]. When you have eight on the bench it allows you to do that.”
