FORMER Fremantle captain Peter Bell celebrated his 32nd birthday by playing his first match with the Dockers since moving north to Geraldton and is confident that he can succeed in 2008 despite living 400km away.

Bell looked good in his first appearance and was happy with how he went, but not with the team's 36-point loss. He will look to play again next Saturday against Port Adelaide at Noarlunga and possibly the next week for South Fremantle in the WAFL.

"I wanted to play 50 to 60 per cent of the game, at half-time I had played 60 so I deliberately played less after that. I was very happy with the way my conditioning felt, I needed to be sharper with my ball handling, but that's no different to any other pre-season match," Bell said.

"I am as fit as I've been in the last four or five years, but match fitness is the key and that's why it was great to be back out there even though it was a disappointing effort from the team."

Bell is unsure how the experiment will work but he is determined to give it a shot.

"It's an unknown quantity what I'm trying to achieve, but I have a lot of pride in my performance and I don’t want to let myself or the footy club down. I'm doing everything I can in a professional manner to give me the best opportunity to do that," he said.

"I'm hoping that this game was nothing more than an aberration and I'm very confident in the playing group or else I wouldn’t go to these extraordinary lengths and put this pressure on myself and family to do this. I feel we have a playing group mature enough to threaten this year."

One could have excused Bell for taking the pre-season lightly given he was away from the team, but that is not what has made him a champion in his 273-game, 13-year career.

"My day starts at 5am and finishes at about 10pm when the kids go to bed and I do my second conditioning session. I put a full day's work in between that. I've managed to find massages and a yoga teacher up there, so the only thing I'm missing out on is the team environment," he said.

"There are some young guys in the East Fremantle development squad that I do some quick hands and kicking work with. I am trying to make it to one or two training sessions a week with the group, so I feel I'm getting enough work in that area."

Bell is feeling refreshed to be away from the Perth football scene, where the intense media scrutiny has got to him at times. He was going to retire last year, but the club and coach Mark Harvey enticed him to stay and he's now looking forward to the challenge ahead.

"It has been no secret that the extra pressures of football weighed me down, but I feel revived and mentally fantastic. It's better than I've felt for a long time and I'm looking forward to the challenge," he said.

"Everyone at the club and people that I respect were able to swing me around to play one more year and I'm not happy to do that. It wasn’t one thing that persuaded me, but just the excitement that Mark had about the future of the footy club and how he saw me evolving with it."