An unusually sluggish Bulldogs line-up trailed Fremantle for most of the game before Adam Cooney, Jason Akermanis and Daniel Giansiracusa sparked a six-goal final quarter to see the side maintain its undefeated opening to the season.
In a blunt post-match assessment, Eade said his side had played poorly and had been lucky to escape with the four points after being clearly out-classed by a revitalised Fremantle side for three quarters of the game.
But Eade praised the character of his players in bouncing back to win a game that appeared to be lost.
“The first three quarters was terrible,” Eade said.
“Our skills and our decision making was the worst I’ve seen it all year. It was shocking but in the end we lifted the intensity.
“It’s marvellous in this game that your skill rate is proportional to your work rate. In the last quarter we lifted our work rate, we seemed to be running on top of the ground and all of a sudden our skills picked up.”
Eade said he never thought the game was beyond the Bulldogs and had urged his players at the final break to back themselves to run down the 18-point deficit.
“I thought we could lift, we’ve proved it in other games this year,” he said.
“There was no doubt I thought we could win and if we’d taken our chances we could have won by two or three goals,” he said.
“I thought the players lifted, I think they believed they could win. We spoke about the fact we could win.
“And certainly we kicked the first two, they kicked the next two, so it gets back out to three goals. But I think to the guys’ credit there’s a lot of belief, there’s a lot of character amongst the group and a lot of leadership, so that was pleasing.
“Most of the games (this year) we’ve been challenged and we’ve been able to answer that challenge.”
Eade was quick to hose down any comparison between the Bulldogs and the competition’s other unbeaten sides, Geelong and Hawthorn.
“They’re obviously the standouts and the fact is we’re still a young side and we’ve still got a long way to go,” he said.
“We didn’t play well today, I think we got a lot out of it as far as our belief and our character of the group but we still need to play more consistent footy.”
Eade said he expected star midfielder Scott West to be sidelined for another “one or two weeks” with an ongoing knee injury.
