Fremantle are easy targets but deserve respect for hitting back

The Guardian

15 hours ago

With blood still spurting out of his head, and resembling John Rambo under Soviet interrogation, Andrew Brayshaw still managed a semblance of humility, of calm and of coherence in an on-field interview on Saturday night. Brayshaw is that kind of player and it had been that kind of game. It had been an intense, occasionally spiteful contest, the sort of game Fremantle have coughed up too many times under coach Justin Longmuir. But they were the more composed and tougher side against the highly-rated Hawthorn. The Dockers laid more than 100 tackles, 14 of them coming from Brayshaw.
Longmuir didn't have his head split open but whenever he loses, it always feels like it's his head on the chopping block. Whenever someone like St Kilda's Ross Lyon has a narrow loss, it's a coaching masterclass. When Longmuir loses, even when they go down narrowly to a resurgent Sydney at the SCG, he's suddenly the coach under the most pressure. In so many ways, Longmuir is an easy target. He doesn't have the 'aura', the polish, the force of personality and the playing record of many other senior coaches. He's on a rolling contract. And he's on the other side of the country to the majority of the football media.
One of his fiercest and most persistent critics has been David King. A few years ago, King called Longmuir's Dockers 'a con.' He called it 'fake footy' and 'a waste of time.' He doubled down after the Dockers' loss to the Swans last Sunday, saying they had the best list in competition, that the Fremantle coaching job is the best to have in 2026, and that Longmuir was unlikely to be the man in the role. 'This guy' he called him.
Longmuir, to his credit, bit back this week. King, in turn, defended his own work-rate and right to an opinion, saying, 'You'd go a long way to find someone who does more research than myself.' It's all part of what Saints coach Lyon calls 'the great pantomime.'
Most of it is nonsense. Footy's ability to breathlessly inhabit an issue that really doesn't matter is probably unparalleled in public life. At this stage of the season, there's usually a deep dive on the state of the game and umpiring, and there's usually a stoush between a coach and a prominent media figure.
But it's always interesting to see the unconscious biases, axe grinding and groupthink at play when it comes to assessing senior coaches. Compare, for instance, the way King and his regular co-host Kane Cornes analyse the coaching tenures of Sam Mitchell and Luke Beveridge. A 'football genius' Cornes calls Mitchell. Granted, the bar for a genius in this instance isn't particularly high. It's pretty much whoever agrees to go on radio with him that particular week. It's whoever doesn't want to throttle him or ban him from their rooms at any given moment.
For the purposes of this exercise, it's also worth comparing the way they speak about Longmuir with the way they talk about Carlton coach Michael Voss. 'Vossy's doing a great job,' King said after the Blues defeat to North Melbourne. 'You haven't heard him whinge, you haven't heard him shuffle the responsibility to another department,' he added this week. 'He's taken it all on board, he has spoken with clarity,' Cornes replied. 'Word perfect.'
Longmuir is rarely 'word perfect'. He doesn't live in Melbourne, he doesn't wrestle car thieves, he didn't play under Leigh Matthews, and he isn't good mates with half the Fox Footy panellists. He's therefore held to very different standards. However he's to be commended for what he's doing with this Dockers team.
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Contrary to King's claim that they have the best list in the competition, they are still a maturing team with considerable deficiencies, especially when the ball is on the ground in their backline. But they are grinding out wins, solving problems on the run, and holding their nerve in close finishes. A lot of the hype around Fremantle, some of it a product of their own messaging, has faded, and they're all the better for it.
It can be incredibly difficult and problematic to assess coaches. Premiership coaches Adam Simpson and John Longmire both said recently that they were at their best when the team was going badly. A good place to start is to pay less attention to aura, to what the current coaches say and who they say it to, and more to who they beat and how they do it. On that measure, Longmuir deserves a bit more credit and a bit more respect than what he's been afforded.