Fremantle’s young midfield trio Andy Brayshaw, Adam Cerra and Caleb Serong are responding well to a vote of confidence by senior coach Justin Longmuir after an impressive performance against the Giants at Optus Stadium on Sunday.
Brayshaw was arguably Freo’s best and clocked plenty of midfield minutes while skipper Nat Fyfe played predominantly as a forward.
Fyfe attended just one centre bounce for the match, before being subbed off with concussion at three-quarter time.
By comparison, Brayshaw attended 17 centre bounces for the game, alongside Serong (13 centre bounces), Cerra (13) and David Mundy (11), while James Aish attended eight.
Speaking from the rooms as this week’s guest on Fremantle’s new post-match podcast Final Siren with Duck and Oz, Brayshaw said it was a shared responsibility to win the inside contest.
“It’s an awesome feeling to know that we can play Nath forward and still win the contest inside,” Brayshaw said.
“It’s been something that we’ve been working on and JL has put a lot of confidence in us three and Dave as well to be able to let Nath go forward and kick snags.
“Adam and Caleb are two of my best mates at the Club, we pretty much do everything together and I’ll definitely be trying to get in Cez’s ear to re-sign at the Club.”
Brayshaw complimented his 32 disposals, six tackles, five marks and 440 metres gained with two impressive running goals against the Giants.
Adding goals to his game was a focus for Brayshaw over the pre-season, with extra goal-kicking with Cerra and Serong post-training becoming a staple feature.
“As a midfielder you want to be good at contests and with your spread, but you also want to be able to go somewhere else and play another role,” Brayshaw said.
“Predominantly, that’s probably been on a wing for me over the last few years, but this year we are really trying to spin a few of our mids through forward.
“Fyfey obviously played there a fair bit today, and Caleb, Cez and Dave are all able to do that as well and I’ve been trying to work that into my game.
“To take the game on and when I’ve got an opportunity to pin the ears back and go for it.
“It’s come down to some extras after training with blokes like Caleb and Adam…we’ve all been practicing it.”
Brayshaw credited a two-week intensive ‘mini pre-season’ as a significant driver in the young midfielder’s improvement so far this season.
After returning to Melbourne over the Christmas break, Brayshaw was joined by fellow Victorians including Cerra, Serong and Hayden Young for two weeks of training while in quarantine.
Brayshaw believes high training standards were set amongst the group in the quarantine training period.
“We got to train in that little segmented group and I think we really had high standards in our training,” Brayshaw said.
“We had Adam Cerra, Caleb Serong, Hayden Young - these sort of guys - who had been stuck in Victoria…we had two weeks together to do our own sort of mini pre-season.
“I think that set the standard for us in terms of our work rate, our extras, everything we’ve been doing this pre-season.
“In particular (we focused on) our bodywork around stoppages, working really hard to be as fit as I can so I can spread around the ground and just working on my on-the-run goals.”
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