Captain Alex Pearce says he understands exactly how the Fremantle fans will be feeling after a disappointing one-point loss to North Melbourne at Optus Stadium.
Fremantle have now dropped their opening two games of the season after starting the games as favourites, and fell just short of a miraculous comeback after the Kangaroos kicked the opening four goals.
The game rhymed with many Fremantle performances in 2022, where the team either fell short or came back after giving away an early lead.
Pearce Fremantle’s slow starts were again discussed post-game.
“It’s extremely disappointing. We had an average start, we got ourselves back into the game for parts of it,” Pearce said.
“(Post-game) we spoke about how it felt out there and why we’re getting ourselves into these positions.
“It’s not just one area of the game that’s letting us down, we struggled on defence for parts of the game, we got beaten in the contest for a lot of the game and then there’s times we were able to move forward and we couldn’t capitalise.
“We just spoke about our mindset out there and how we’re not playing as real unit.”
Pearce on what went down after the siren
Pearce thanked the 40,487 fans in attendance and was thankful to know the Purple Army would be back in force for next week’s RAC Derby despite the result.
“We’re hurting with you at the moment,” Pearce said.
“We really want to get our own campaign off to a really good start for them, we loved their support all throughout the game and we can’t wait to have them out there next week in the Derby, which is going to be a huge game and we want to bounce back for our fans.”
Pearce said he remained proud of the fight the team showed in the final term, kicking four of the last six goals, including two from Jaeger O’Meara and one from an unlikely source in defender Brennan Cox to bring Freo within a point.
“We want to be a team that fights to the end all the time but we definitely would like to be in a better spot with 10 minutes to go,” Pearce said.
“The way that we fought it out and played with a bit of freedom at the end there and played to win, there’s always something we can take into next week.”
