Two years and 11 days ago, Fremantle took on the Western Bulldogs in Perth, were expected to win … and were crunched by 49 points with the margin flattering them in a performance that proved once and for all that the attritional style of footy that took them to a semi final in 2022 was no longer going to work.

“Boring, brainless and utterly broken – it’s time for Fremantle to find Plan B,” ran the headline of my Footy Fix that evening.

I mention this because, 47 games later, having reinvented themselves as a fast-moving, handball-happy outfit capable of devastating bursts of goals at their best, gone within a final-month capitulation of a serious crack at a flag, and headed into a new year with a shiny new star recruit and as a bona fide premiership dark horse, they headed to Marvel Stadium to face St Kilda under the Friday night lights … and put in a performance so rank as to immediately break two years’ worth of efforts to fix what happened against the Bulldogs back in 2023.

This was Fremantle at their absolute worst. Pulverised at stoppages, with Caleb Serong shut down completely by a ferocious Saints midfield and no one able to pick up the slack. Slower than treacle with ball in hand, giving in entirely to the Saints’ suffocating system and lacking the dare, desire or sheer will to even try breaking through. And impotent in attack, with no plans beyond trying to sit the footy on a wounded Josh Treacy’s head, hope for the best, and be let down every time.

From the utter eyesore that was the first half, in which Freo managed just one goal, seven points in total and honestly were lucky to score that much, the bottom then spectacularly fell out of a defence that was at least holding up the damn wall up to half time.

This wasn’t the run-of-a-mill horror show you’d expect of a properly bad team – there were few outrageously bad skill errors, nor was the system an obvious, egregious mess like West Coast or North Melbourne have endured this year.

But that just makes the butchering that occurred all the more embarrassing: the Saints’ pressure was phenomenal, their overlap run and carry tremendous in the third quarter especially, and their contested marking inside 50 once the game opened up a highlight, but in truth their opponents didn’t fire a single shot for them to dodge. One-way traffic doesn’t do it justice.

A ten-goal loss against a middle-of-the-road opposition in a match, away game or no, that Freo started as favourites in is demoralising enough on its own. Add the context around Justin Longmuir, the strengths of the team he leads and the journey it has taken the Dockers to get here – wherever ‘here’ is, because at this point it’s impossible to tell – and Friday night’s insipid display with the whole footy world watching (or at least those of us who could stomach it) veers dangerously close to coach-killer territory.

This is Longmuir’s sixth year at the helm. After his third, he was just about the best coach in the business, smoothly completing Freo’s rise into premiership contention and cultivating a team with immense talent in every facet – from a star-studded midfield, to a deadly one-two ruck combination, to 2022’s most miserly defence with all bases covered to smother opponents to death.

It is inexcusable for a team at this stage of their development – and that’s even putting aside the talent on the list, of which Shai Bolton’s arrival was meant to be among the final pieces of the puzzle – to still be capable of performing this poorly.

A coach in his sixth year whose charges have suddenly become home-track bullies, irrepressible at home and yet routinely pathetic on the road, with one finals berth to his name in his tenure to date, deserves the intense scrutiny that will indubitably come his way this week.

With a rolling contract over his head, the season, and Longmuir’s coaching career, is far from unsalvageable – but something would need to radically change for this team to so much as become the sum of its parts.

And it’s honestly hard to work out how exactly their multitude of problems can be fixed.

The high-octane handballing through the corridor, the electric dash from stoppages of a Brayshaw, the eternal outside running of speed demons Michael Frederick, Bolton and co., vanished in the smog of a Saints team intent on an ambush.

As was the case in 2023, the mark numbers of Freo defenders tells a story both where this game was being played, and what the Dockers’ response to losing the midfield battle was: chip around the backline, wait for something to present further afield, and when nothing was forthcoming, bomb long to a contest, lose the next stoppage, and be forced to defend all over again.

The loss of Hayden Young robbed the Dockers of their most dynamic, lethal-kicking on-baller, but with just one goal to their name when his hamstring again gave in it wasn’t as if that alone was what they were missing, either.

When it actually game together, there were signs of Freo’s usual modus operandi – this slick passage down the wing, lovely Bolton handball to an overlapping Brayshaw, and dangerous kick to an isolated, under-the-pump pair of Saints defenders is exactly what we’ve come to expect from the Dockers over the last two years.

But up until the final ten minutes, when the result was well and truly done, this was quite literally the only time the Dockers put anything close to this on display.

The major misfire, though, was obviously the clearance count – and a 50-22 walloping is as ghastly a differential as you’ll see all year.

But this domination wasn’t just a one-off, but rather a slowly creeping weakness reaching rock bottom.

Freo’s strength last year, clearly, was from stoppages: for much of 2024, it was so far and away the most deadly clearance team in the game as to defeat the purpose of comparison.

How does a team go from being the second-best ever clearance-winning team on record, to being smashed by 28 by a St Kilda midfield that ranked as one of the worst on-ball groups in the AFL this year?

In 2024, the Dockers averaged seven more clearances per game than their opponents, using that power at the coalface to put together handball chains, particularly from defensive 50 – only Sydney scored more from their defensive half last year compared to their opponents – and run rivals off their feet.

It’s not working, this year – Freo ranked 11th for stoppage wins heading into Friday night, and are worse than their opponents at scoring from them. And just as it was in 2023, Longmuir seemingly has no plan for when teams shut them down at the coalface – and the Saints brutally exposed their reliance on Serong to drive that.

Caleb Serong and Alex Pearce react to Fremantle’s loss. (Photo by Quinn Rooney/Getty Images)

Since being thrashed by Geelong in Round 1, Freo have won all three games their star midfielder has won double-digit clearances, and lost three of four (beating only Richmond) when he hasn’t.

It means that, after losing the clearance count in just five games last year, they have lost it four times in the first eight games. That’s a radical curbing of what, just 12 months ago, was their biggest strength.

Serong in 2024 won 46 more clearances than the next-best Docker, Brayshaw; it’s already up to 30 from eight games this year. Only one other team has a gap higher than 19 between their best and second-best clearance winners; St Kilda themselves, with Jack Macrae somehow 41 up on Jack Steele.

On Friday night, Serong might have finished with eight clearances, but up to half time, when this game was set up, he had just one – and of his seven in the second half, few were more than desperate hacks forward under heavy St Kilda pressure.

The message is clear: stop Serong winning clearances, as several teams including the Saints have effectively managed this year, and put Freo firmly on the back foot, and without an effective alternative to get things back on their terms.

In their best two wins this year, against the Bulldogs and Adelaide, the defining characteristic isn’t that both were played in Perth after all: it’s stoppage power.

Against the Crows, the Dockers won the clearance count 38-30, and with Andrew Brayshaw freed up to repeatedly explode from stoppages, controlled territory all night and dictated terms from the get-go.

The Bulldogs might have won the clearance count, but that was a match won with six goals in 15 minutes in the second quarter, in which Freo, you guessed it, went 7-1 for clearances and kicked three of those goals from stoppages. Aside from that burst, this was another match in which they were predominantly second-best.

The point of all this is that, yet again, Longmuir finds himself having to reinvent a side that has had its one-wood comprehensively worked out, exploited, and turned into a weakness.

It’s why the Saints result should only be surprising in the volume of the towelling up, and not that the Dockers were out-coached by a shrewd operator in Ross Lyon, and could find no solution.

Perhaps another complete retooling, as happened two years ago, is on the cards; but if that’s required, and another year of missing finals is the result, then it’s highly unlikely Longmuir is going to be the man to undertake it.