Hawthorn paid the price for poor disposal and wayward kicking which saw them with just one goal from 12 scoring shots at half time.
With injuries to Cyril Rioli (hamstring) and Xavier Ellis (ankle), the Hawks battled out the second half effectively two players short.
Clarkson said his team had turned around its fortunes after a slow start to 2010 but had “spluttered” toward the end of the season as injuries took their toll.
“The last half of the season we were up with some of the better sides in the competition in terms of win-loss,” he said.
“Unfortunately for us we got a couple of key injuries and a lot of those injuries were to our runners - and we play our best footy when we’ve got our runners in the side.
“We just lost a couple at crucial stages over the last two to three weeks. And today Rioli and Ellis being more or less out of the game by the second quarter ... we found it pretty tough.
“In my view there’d be four or five other sides in the competition that would be pretty pleased that we’ve been knocked out.”
Clarkson was at a loss to explain the Hawks’ failure to make an impact on the scoreboard in the first half.
“We won a lot of statistics that we look for in games,” he said.
“We won the tackles, won the inside 50s, just won the clearances, won the hard ball gets, the contested footy; we won everything except the scoreboard in a sense.
“Full credit to Fremantle; they played very, very well today. We just didn’t have enough polish with the footy and we didn’t have enough run and overlap to take advantage of the chances that we had with the ball.
“We’ll learn from it, but unfortunately we have to wait another five or six months before we get another crack at it.”
Despite the Hawks having what he called “a pretty ordinary day”, Clarkson hadn’t completely lost his sense of humour.
When asked how far Fremantle could go in the finals, Clarkson noted they would now have to play away from home.
“Freo are a 25-goal better side over here,” he joked, in a reference to the match two weeks ago in Launceston in which the Hawks thrashed Fremantle.
“They beat us by five (goals) and we beat them by 20 over there - so we reckon they’re a 25-goal better side over here.”
