“Real deal” Dockers: Why JL deserves credit for firing up Freo

Justin Longmuir deserves credit for making Fremantle the “real deal”.

Following their come-from-behind 15-point win over Hawthorn in Perth on Thursday night, Kane Cornes spoke glowingly of the Dockers.

That was an eighth win on the trot and has Freo sitting on top of the ladder for the meantime.

The way in which they overpowered the Hawks late in proceedings has Cornes wondering: “Are the Dockers the real deal?”

His SEN Fireball co-host David King replied: “Of course they are, of course they are.”

Before highlighting where the Dockers are firing.

“I look at this lineup and they have got a handful of players - not many teams have got a handful - that when the game is declared an emergency, you need someone to rip the game from the opposition,” King continued.

“Caleb Serong does it in last quarters regularly. We saw Luke Jackson do it last night. We saw Murphy Reid get involved and do it. We saw Shai Bolton get involved and do it. Hayden Young was just pressing all night trying to have that big moment. We saw Josh Treacy throwing himself at packs.

“I look at them and I think that's growth. They don't wait for the game to come to them. They don't wait for an opportunity. They chase it. You can almost feel the energy lifting. The crowd played a part, obviously.

“I love the way they're building. They've got to stack these wins. It's a race to 18 wins. I said that earlier in the year.

“If this team wants to win the flag, they've got to finish top two. How they do that, there is a pathway obviously, but they've got to finish top two. So it was an important win last night.”

Cornes wanted to give Longmuir his flowers for tinkering with the game style to make the Dockers a much better attacking team.

“He needs some credit, the coach, because they are definitely playing a more attacking style,” he said.

“We (at Channel 7) were lucky enough to have a Zoom call with him on Wednesday and they spoke about their pre-season and how they wanted to score more. There's a couple of examples last night - early Hayden Young's got someone right on him, doesn't go off the mark, just handballs straight away with a forward handball and off they go.

“There's speed, they've got elite small forwards. They really want for nothing from a personnel point of view but I think the coach has got this group humming, eight in a row.

“Kingy, are you going to give him some credit this morning?”

King, who has been critical of Longmuir’s game style, still sees some slowness about the Dockers.

“I still think they play slow. There's times when they handball the ball, but they're infrequent," he said.

“I think you'd find last night they played pretty slow for the bulk of the night. They meandered through the second and third quarter.”

But Cornes doesn’t necessarily agree.

“I think everyone's got different modes that they go to. Every team's not going to be breakneck speed the whole time,” he said further.

“I think when they want to drop the hammer, they drop the hammer, and go as quick as anyone. I think there's been a bit more of a shift in terms of the risk-taking that they're playing with fast handball ball movement.

“Then once they get you down the line and then they win that contest, good night, lights out. They probably left three goals out there in the third quarter. There were players slipping over, there were some ordinary skill errors.

“In the end, you look at the stat sheet, not dissimilar to the discussion we had about Collingwood-Hawthorn last week. They look at the stat sheet and go, ‘Geez, we pretty much had this game in control for a lot of it’.”

Freo’s eight in a row is their longest winning streak since 2015.

The Dockers now own a 8-1 record with a healthy percentage of 131 ahead of next weekend’s clash with Essendon at the MCG.