Despite a brave showing from his Bulldogs against the top-of-the-table Dockers, Senior Coach Luke Beveridge was honest in his assessment following the disappointing loss.

Here's what he had to say following the game. 

On defensive efforts throughout the night: 
 
"We've been a pretty reasonable team defensively in recent times but they still scored from their forward 50 stoppages.
 
"So it wasn't by design that we had saturation of numbers behind the ball, we wanted to press up at different times and we didn't get our execution right.
 
"We came here tonight to win the game, not to be safe and eliminate risk but we didn't execute well enough."

On not making the most of scoring opportunities: 
 
"There were times in the game when we were in there from a scoreboard perspective, we had momentum opportunities (but) we fumbled the ball or we mucked up gilt-edged chances and we fuelled Fremantle's game and we didn’t cope too well at the end of the game so it's a disappointing night.
 
"Forward of the ball we fumbled, we didn't kick the ball well, we missed some targets, we rushed ourselves, so we couldn't capitalise. In the end they took a lot of uncontested marks, we slowed them down, we delayed their game until late and then we let them into the corridor … fatigue can do that to a team.
 
"I think we scored most from our back half, you just can't play that way and beat a team like Fremantle. We couldn't get enough territory and keep it there. The mix of our forward line was very different, it was quite unstable at times."

On lessons learned and approach for next week: 
 
"We come away disappointed, they're the benchmark team.

"We don't walk away thinking that was a satisfactory outing, a number of our boys will be really flat that they were nowhere near their best and we needed a lot of our players somewhere near their best to win tonight.
 
"So we'll take a glass half full approach as we go into North Melbourne on Thursday night and pick the lads up.

"They've been pretty good with their resilience and dusting themselves off so we'll look forward to the next challenge."