FREMANTLE tagger Ryan Crowley is using his provisional suspension to mentor Clancee Pearce, who has assumed the run-with role while Crowley prepares for his upcoming anti-doping tribunal hearing.
Coach Ross Lyon said Crowley had continued to attend team meetings and be a presence around the club ahead of his May 1 hearing.
Pearce was used in a run-with role on Port Adelaide captain Travis Boak on Sunday, in a match-up Lyon said he would learn plenty from.
Boak finished the game with 25 possessions, 10 marks and a goal after averaging 18 possessions in his previous three games against Fremantle when manned by Crowley.
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Crowley, who won Fremantle's best and fairest award in 2012 as a tagger, will be unavailable until at least round five, paving the way for Pearce to prove himself in the early rounds.
"He (Crowley) is coming in, he's in every meeting, he's training and he's helping mentor Clancee Pearce," Lyon told radio station SEN.
"He didn't attend last night's game, just to protect him a little bit from a lot of questions.
"Any way you cut it, it's a terrible situation for him, the club and for AFL football."
Lyon said he hadn't asked Crowley what happened because of the legal process involved, but said players had no excuses when it came to ingesting prohibited substances, given their access to club doctors.
"All the education in the world, we all suffer from the condition that we're human and we're not perfect and we make some bad decisions," Lyon said.
"I went through it with the players and Ryan comes into it … ignorance is no excuse and there is strict liability … if you put something in, you are liable.
"I think that brings it to a really sharp point. Unless it's administered by your club doctor and approved, don't take it."
Meanwhile, Lyon said Fremantle could taper off Luke McPharlin's workload in the second half of the season in an effort to prevent the valuable key defender breaking down again at a crucial point of the year.
But in the unlikely event that the Dockers' season derails, he said the 33-year-old could retire early and pave the way for young tall Alex Pearce to come into the team.
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McPharlin has suffered calf injuries in the lead up to finals in each of the past two seasons, failing to return for the September campaign last year. A hamstring injury kept him out of the finals in 2012.
"We do know with Luke we've broken him down at the back end of the year, sometimes through circumstance," Lyon told radio station 3AW.
"We'll assess it at the halfway mark, and if we're not going very well then we'll play young Alex Pearce all the way through and Luke will probably retire.
"But if we're going really well and we've got some room to move then we'll look to back him off a little bit."
Lyon said he was thrilled with captain Matthew Pavlich's four-goal performance on Sunday and the team was using him more efficiently in a deeper role.
The coach said young forward Matt Taberner was ready to return from an Achilles injury and support the captain after kicking four goals in Peel Thunder's loss to West Perth in the WAFL.
"Whether he plays this week or not, he's ready to go … we're really keen for him to play and he would have played round one, there's no doubt about that."
