AFL
Fremantle Dockers coach Justin Longmuir told his team to play ‘vanilla footy’ against Indigenous All Stars
Fremantle coach Justin Longmuir has revealed he deliberately kept most of his team’s game style hidden during their 43-point loss to the Indigenous All Stars, to avoid opposition clubs getting their hands on high quality vision.
The Dockers lost 16.12 (108) to 9.11 (65) in front of 37,865 people at Optus Stadium. Longmuir said the All Stars played with a skill and speed that his team couldn’t contain, but revealed he was also conscious of the cameras behind the goals and the ability of other AFL clubs to analyse how Fremantle played at this point of the pre-season.
Longmuir said Fremantle would play vastly different football by round one.
“We played a pretty vanilla brand. It’s interesting because all of the other teams will get the vision and be able to watch it from behind the goals so we tried to keep it pretty vanilla. We’ll work on bits and pieces next week when we’ve got match sim and the vision is not released,” Longmuir said.
“At this time of year we are just trying to make sure we get the basics right.
“We didn’t want to expose some of the things we’ve been working on. I know when we do our match sim, 18 on 18, no-one gets the vision, We’ve been working on a few things in that space. We didn’t want to give too many teams a look at it today.”
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Forward Sam Switkowski left the field after a solid knock in the first quarter but Longmuir said he hadn’t been diagnosed with concussion during the match. The club will wait to see how he recovers but Longmuir said he seemed fine on the bench. Brandon Walker suffered a broken nose during the final quarter.
Brandon Walker broke his nose. YES
The Dockers were missing a host of star players and Longmuir said the group would learn a lot from playing against a team that was filled with some of the AFL’s best players.
“There was a lot of talent on the opposition,” he said.
“We knew they’d have a lot of flair and play with a lot of joy and really try to put on a good show. I thought they were cleaner, used the ball a lot better and that skill really shone through.
Caleb Serong had plenty of the ball. YES
“It’s going to be an interesting one to watch back and review it with the players. Clearly there was a lot more fatigue on our side of things. That was planned. They seemed a lot fresher, probably because of the rotations and how they were able to spin their players.
“It was always going to be a marker for where we are at. We didn’t defend the ground the way we would have liked. Playing against a team with that much skill, run and speed, we got exposed when we didn’t get it done in the contest and we didn’t stick our tackles. you get one chance against a side like that. Too often we gave them too many looks at it and their skill really shone through.”