DESPITE no finals action this year, Luke McPharlin believes that future success for Fremantle is not far away.

With a spate of retirements this year with Matthew Carr, Peter Bell, Shaun McManus, Heath Black and Mark Johnson all hanging up the boots, McPharlin has relished the opportunity to take on a bigger leadership role this year and believes Matthew Pavlich can lead the club into its most successful era.

“I’d love to think I’ve got a few more years left and in that time, the next four or five years, we can have some finals success again and really have a crack at the big one, one day,” McPharlin said.

“We’ve seen in the past teams turn around quite quickly and that’s something we’d like to do but we have to be realistic as well and realise that it could take a bit of rebuilding.

“Obviously I can’t really tell you exactly when it’s going to happen but I’d like to think we have a chance over the next five years to do something and Matthew Pavlich being the champion footballer that he is can lead us through the next era.”

Fremantle will take heart from the form of sides like Geelong and Hawthorn, who both missed the finals in 2006, with the Cats and the Hawks playing finals football last year and both teams have also qualified for the major round again in 2008.

Whilst McPharlin will be watching the September action from his living room, he concedes that the finals campaign, at least at this stage, has all the hallmarks of a one horse race.

“Geelong are clearly the champions at the moment and they’ve had an outstanding year,” McPharlin said.

“I think they’ll probably go on and win it again. They were one of those teams that turned it around quite quickly from pretty poor seasons to being successful again.

“We will just watch the finals series with interest and hopefully gain some experience from it.

“It’s always a tough time to be sitting watching football during September but that’s unfortunately the reality of this season for us. Hopefully we won’t be doing that next year or the year after.”