This morning I accidentally listened to some short, chubby, balding, opinionated ABC sports broadcaster talking about Fremantle. Some bloke had had the temerity to ring up and mention that we just might be missing Haze, but the inciteful hack put him in his place, and said that the problem with Freo was that we always have an excuse when we lose. And I thought, "By jingo, he's right!". So from now on lets not have any excuses.

When we lose, lets just say that the better team won on the day. If the wind changes direction each quarter, so we are always kicking into a gale, and a journo asks if it affected the result, lets just say, "No, I don't think that was the difference between the two teams." If 6 of our guys are stretchered off, and we end up with only 16 fit players on the field, and someone suggests that may have had something to do with our losing, we'll just tell them, "No, we can't hold with that, it would just be making excuses". If the timekeeper forgets to stop the clock, or the umpire doesn't hear the siren, hell, they are just excuses. We have to grow up. When the mrp goes through each of our games with a fine tooth comb looking for ways to rub out Josh or Doddy - excuses.

There is one upside to this, and consistency demands we do it. When we win, no matter how lucky we were, it was just because we were better. If we are asked if our opposition were affected by the loss of 3 key defenders, we'll just say, "No, that would just be making excuses. They just weren't good enough."