FREMANTLE struggled to cope with the pressure of Collingwood and a vociferous 90,000-strong crowd at the MCG in its 20-point semi-final loss, coach Justin Longmuir has said.
It was the second-largest crowd the Dockers had played for in its history, with just David Mundy and Michael Walters having played in front of a larger group in the 2013 Grand Final.
"I thought we started the game reasonably well and got the ball in our front half, but we just got shown up defensively. Their speed of ball movement really cut through us early. It put us on the back foot," Longmuir said.
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"We coughed up field position and I just thought we didn't have the players that handled the basics in the contest and execution under pressure. It was a big occasion in terms of 90,000 crowd against us, and I thought they had a lot more players who handled that situation over us.
"A lot went wrong, but when you look at it, they just handled the basics of the game better than we did."
The inside-50 differential was 15 Collingwood's way at three-quarter time (13 by the game's end), with the Pies having strangled Fremantle's ball movement when the game was in the balance.
"We didn't get it in there quick enough. I don't think our forwards moved enough and forced their defenders to defend," Longmuir said.
"Then the ball came out of there way too easy, it went end-to-end six times in the first quarter, which hasn't really happened against us, so they gave us a bit of a lesson there."
With the season over attention turns to the trade period, and Longmuir said he expected news soon from uncommitted players, with versatile tall Griffin Logue one who has attracted attention elsewhere in North Melbourne.
"There's always movement. We'll work through that over the coming months. The timeframe's going to come pretty soon, the players will be with us, at most, another week, then they're off on holidays," Longmuir said.
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"I imagine we'll get some answers soon and we'll work through that. Trade period starts after the Grand Final, and we want to make sure we're ready for that, so those conversations will happen in the next week or so."
Longmuir said injured skipper Nat Fyfe (hamstring) was a strong chance to play if the Dockers had progressed further.
"Yeah, I'm really confident he'll get back to his best (next year). That's obviously driven by his body, but I think we've seen some good signs that he's got a lot of things right with his back and knees and whatnot.
"So, get on top of the soft-tissue stuff and give him a really good season, which he should have. He could have possibly played next week or the week after, he was close to being in good health. That'll set him up really well for the off-season."
Despite the poor nature of the loss, it was another year of progress for the Dockers under Longmuir, his third in charge.
"I said to the players after the game, unless you win the Grand Final, you leave disappointed, whether you miss finals, go out first week, second week or lose a prelim or a granny, you're disappointed," he said.
"That's how we should feel right now, disappointed we weren't up to the challenge and Collingwood tonight. In the next week or so, we'll get the players on their holidays and reflect on the year in its totality, but tonight's not the night.
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"In the end, we've won 16 games and drawn one, that's a reasonable year. But there's no guarantees, so we need to get to work in the off-season and get to the top four.
"We definitely improved our footy, we had a lot of individual players improve their footy, so we'll reflect on that come the end of the week and use that to set up the off-season and the pre-season and hopefully improve our footy again."
