Source :- PERTH NOW NEWS
Fremantle feel like they couldn’t be any better prepared for the AFL grand final with coach Justin Longmuir saying their dominant home and away season forced them to start making travel plans in advance, and implementing plans for the entire week.
The Dockers will play in the second AFL grand final after breaking multiple club records throughout the year. But Saturday will be Longmuir’s third grand final because he was an assistant coach at West Coast in 2015 and at Collingwood during 2018.
He said there were huge differences between the preparation needed for non-Victorian teams and those that are based interstate, revealing the Dockers had people mapping out their week for a long time.
“Everything’s well planned behind the scenes. The thing with being an interstate team, you have to have a lot of stuff planned really early in the campaign,” he explained.
“When you finish top of the ladder, a lot of people were asking questions about grand final travel before the end of the season, so that’s all been mapped out. Charter flights have all been mapped out. A lot of the work has been done behind the scenes already.
“We’ll get the players, outline the schedule, get them in on Sunday, and talk about the week and some of the distractions and how we’re going to handle it. We will draw on some of the experiences within the four walls to be able to help prepare the players.”
Fremantle have plenty of grand final experience among their coaching panel. Midfield coach Joel Corey played in four grand finals for Geelong and forwards coach Jaymie Graham was at West Coast during their 2005, 2006, 2015 and 2018 grand finals as both a player and coach. Defensive coach Jade Rawlings coached Norwood to a SANFL premiership.
The club’s Development Coaches Chris Mayne and Tendai Mzungu played in the 2013 grand final and Fremantle’s Leadership boss Damian Martin won six NBL championships for the Perth Wildcats.
Longmuir said the players would enter the grand final feeling more settled than they did in the qualifying final loss to Hawthorn.
“The last two weeks have felt like normal weeks in-season,” he said.
“Sometimes the bye can be a little bit tricky. You outline what you think is the best program and the players train really well, but they are sitting around watching footy and probably burning a lot of nervous energy waiting for the game to come around.
“I felt like that was probably the case coming into the Hawthorn game, where the last two weeks have felt like normal weeks with a little bit more outside noise. Internally they felt like normal weeks.
“So I think it suited this group. I said to them after the Hawthorn game, there’s no reason why we can’t win three games in a row. We’ve won 14 games in a row this year, so that’s not an issue.
“And we’ve got back-to-back travel, but we’ve also faced back-to-back travel this year as well, and won both of those games. So, we’ll draw on some of those experiences and give our best shot.”
