Fremantle coach Mark Harvey believes his players made it easy for St Kilda to dominate Saturday night's NAB Cup semi-final.
Harvey dismissed his team's short break and the fact the club was drawn to play successive weeks in Melbourne as factors in the 71-point defeat.
Also irrelevant, Harvey said, was Freo's decision to rest All-Australian ruckman Aaron Sandilands.
"When you've got younger players in your side and you're not generating enough drive and you're struggling to control the ball yourself, it can be difficult," Harvey said.
"Players can get lost quite quickly if they're inexperienced."
"We got hurt on the counterpunch too easy and then we were fumbling a lot which resulted in a lot of turnovers and hence, we were caught out of position."
Harvey said he expected his players to use lessons learnt playing one 2009 grand finalist into next week's NAB Challenge Series match against the other - Geelong.
"That's the grand final team from last year and we play Geelong next week so we're playing both of them, effectively, within a week. We need to make sure that issues don't arise like they did tonight," he said.
"I think at the 10-minute mark of the third quarter we were only two goals down, we were within striking range."
"But once again, some errors came in, they capitalised."
"We got beaten in the centre square during the third quarter, quite convincingly too, and I think some of our midfielders got stuck in thinking that Aaron was still there and hence they were probably a little more attacking than they should have been."
Harvey said he would try as far as possible to treat next week's clash with the Cats as a full dress rehearsal for Round 1, though some players may need another run the following week to top them off.