Caleb Serong has backed in Luke Jackson to find his form at Fremantle, saying the forward / ruck has been unfairly singled out as a player out of form when the whole team is not delivering.

The vice captain gave a blunt assessment of Fremantle’s opening two games of the season, adding that the poor start leaves plenty of scope to improve ahead of Sunday’s RAC Derby.

“From an individual and team point of view, it’s disappointing, we wanted to be 2-0 at this point of the year,” Serong told Triple M.

“I think the biggest disappointment as a collective is that we’re just not playing the footy that we believe we’re capable of and we’re not even close to scratching the surface of that.

“If you play your best footy and you get beaten by a better team, you can cop that on the chin, but we’re not giving ourselves our best chance.

“We think we’ve got a lot of improvement left in us.”

Serong said the whole team took responsibility for Fremantle’s slow start when asked about media coverage of the 21-year-old Jackson’s first two games for Freo.

“It’s definitely not on him, that’s for sure, it’s on the whole collective from a team point of view, the way we’re playing at the moment,” Serong said.

“I think it’s really unfair to put the blame on him and single him out like that. It’s our job to chuck our arms around him and make sure he understands what we value internally in him, what we want him to bring to gameday.

“When you look at the way he’s playing, he’s getting his hands to a lot of balls, it’s just a matter of time before they start sticking. He takes four marks inside 50 and the narrative changes pretty quick.”

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