The nicest thing we can say about Fremantle’s capitulation to Brisbane on Saturday at the Gabba is that the mid-season bye has come at a good time.

A good time for a rest, because their senior players are cooked. A good time for a serious mid-season pow-wow between the football department and club leaders about what needs to be achieved over the last 10 games of this season.

If we are not being nice, the assessment quickly becomes stark and brutal: Fremantle were handed a football lesson by the bottom team on the ladder, the youngest team in the AFL and a team that went into the game on the end of nine losses in a row.

As performances go this was a stinker. But perhaps it was the stinker the Dockers needed to have to remind themselves what this season should be about.

Ross Lyon sometimes says that teams “separate themselves” from each other with performances over the course of the year.

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On Saturday, the Dockers separated themselves from the top eight headed south. They need to win a minimum six and, given their poor percentage, possibly seven of their last 10 games to make the eight.

They will get Aaron Sandilands back after the bye. If there are no more setbacks, Hayden Ballantyne and Harley Bennell could also figure in the back half of the season. It’s a big if.

And they still have Geelong in Geelong, Greater Western Sydney in Sydney, Sydney in Sydney, Essendon in Melbourne and Richmond and West Coast at Domain Stadium ahead.

As we said a couple of weeks ago, the ladder is sending the Dockers mixed messages: Even after Saturday, the 6-6 win-loss suggests they can play finals. But their percentage, 78.5, puts them in the bottom four.

They have played four close games and won them all. If you take two of those last-gasp wins off them they would be 15th, four wins, eight losses and below Sydney and North Melbourne on percentage.

Again, that is a big if. As Lyon would say, if your aunty had whiskers she would be your uncle. Driven by big contributions at critical times from their senior group, Fremantle found a way to snatch all four of the close ones. But it still paints a very different picture of where the Dockers’ list is at. A very different picture and a more accurate one.

If you cast your mind back to the start of the season, what realistic expectations did you have for this group? Many would have said eight wins, 10 if a lot goes right, the very bottom end of the eight if nearly everything goes right.

Has much changed at the halfway point? Not really. At one point Fremantle won six of seven matches but in the past three weeks have copped thrashings from Adelaide and Brisbane and been beaten at home by a Collingwood side reduced to 18 fit men. This is not the form graph of a team anywhere near the top eight.

After Saturday’s Brisbane debacle, Lyon observed that first-gamer Brennan Cox had “showed some footy nous” and that second-gamer Luke Ryan “showed that he can kick the ball”.

“We’d like more players that can kick the ball well,” Lyon said.

Amen to that and hopefully Cox and Ryan get more chances, but it sums the Dockers up doesn’t it?

An AFL team on the edge of the eight is looking for more players who kick the ball well.

What happened on Saturday was a correction. The Dockers remain a team in the first year of a rebuild needing to play, grow and develop more talent. That may have been forgotten somewhere in those six wins from seven games and it is time to get back to it now.