ROUND Fyfe – err, five – wasn’t a good one for Melbourne. 

But it wasn’t just Nathan Fyfe who shone. It was a host of Fremantle players, including Chris Mayne, David Mundy, Lachie Neale et al who combined to inflict a 68-point victory over Melbourne at the MCG on Sunday.

It reinforced that Fremantle is the team to beat – at this stage – in 2015.

Sure, it might be a long way to go, but on current form, Freo appears to be ahead of the pack.

So far, the Dockers have yet to lose a match. They are the only undefeated team in the competition, having beaten Port Adelaide, Geelong, West Coast Eagles, Sydney Swans and Melbourne. That’s three finalists from last year –and the Eagles are fifth on the ladder.

A terrible final term from Melbourne resulted in the 10-goal-plus loss, when it trailed by 30 points at three quarter-time.

It begged the question: how good is Freo?

For coach Paul Roos, he already knew how good Fremantle was entering round five, given he’s a close watcher of the team via his good mate and opposing coach Ross Lyon.

Asked to point out why Fremantle was ahead of the pack at the moment, Roos said the size of Fremantle’s midfield was an area that had the edge.   

“They’re just so hard to tackle. They’re so big – [Michael] Barlow, David [Mundy] and [Nat] Fyfe – and that’s why they’re able to wear teams down, because of the size of their midfield, [which] is quite dramatic when you compare them to most teams in the competition,” he said.

“We know Fyfe’s a terrific player and I thought we were able to contain him in a sense, but then you’ve got Mundy and Barlow and Lachie Neale and [Stephen] Hill and [Clancee] Pearce.

“They just beat you because they’re such a good team and they’re so well drilled.”

Entering 2015, Fremantle possessed the second oldest list and the second most experienced squad in terms of games. Only North Melbourne – a preliminary finalist in 2014 – topped Freo in both areas.

Roos said it was Freo’s ability to build depth in its list that was another key reason for its success so far this year.

“We’ve got four or five players out [through injury] and we haven’t got anywhere near the depth of some of those other teams,” he said.

“When those guys come in to replace [their injured players] … at Hawthorn or Freo or Sydney – they just play a role and they know what to do. We still don’t have that luxury of bringing guys in and playing roles, because we don’t have the depth.”

For young-gun Angus Brayshaw – playing just his fifth AFL match – the thing that he got out of playing Fremantle for the first time was its capacity to simply play four quarter football.

“Freo do the simple things for longer and for 120 minutes. As Roosy pointed out, it’s a pretty simple game, when it comes down to it,” he told melbournefc.com.au.

“We’ve just got to keep doing what we know we can do – and we’ve shown we can do it – and then we’re in most games. I think that’s what Freo is able to do well – play the game for longer than what we did.

“Their players don’t care who kicks the goal or who gets all of their touches. They trust each other and in many ways, they play the way we want to. As a team performance, we can take a lot from it and improve.”

But despite Fremantle’s emphatic win, Roos said Freo, like any team, was gettable. He added that if it hadn’t been for two poor patches in the match, things could have been different. 

“After the first 10 minutes, it was four [goals] to zero and then the last 20 minutes of the match, [Fremantle kicked seven goals], so they’re the two blocks of the game that they killed us in,” he said.

“The rest of the game was super even.”

Roos said teams playing against Fremantle had to capitalise on every chance, otherwise they would be punished – as happened in the final quarter, when Freo turned the game on its head.   

“Clearly, when you're playing really good teams, you've got to be able to take those small opportunities,” he said.

“We had four scoring shots in the first five minutes of the last quarter and we got four points. They're (Fremantle) a really good team but you'd love to have played better and make them play better to beat us.

“I don't think they had to play that well to beat us. We know they can play well. But you have to take your chances. You can't miss goals and you can't turn the ball over against a good team.”

Key defender Tom McDonald saw it a different way. A proud and driven young man in All-Australian-like form, he was bullish about what his team should’ve done. And he didn’t believe the way Melbourne played was a true reflection of its ability. 

In fact, he didn’t believe Fremantle was way ahead of Melbourne.  

“No, not at all,” he told Dee TV post-match.

“We can match it with them and we can beat them, if we’re playing the right way, but we weren’t. I don’t know why we weren’t at this stage, really.”

For McDonald and co, no doubt, plenty would’ve been learned from Melbourne’s result against Fremantle.

The challenge will be to rectify it against another outstanding opposition in the Sydney Swans at the MCG this Saturday night.

And then it will be Melbourne’s challenge to show how far it’s come against potentially the best in the business later in the year. We’ll know that when the red and blue takes on Fremantle again in the west in round 22.