Fremantle coach Justin Longmuir has declared he won’t allow the end of his team’s 14-game winning run to be treated as a catastrophe but made it perfectly clear he does not believe in the theory that the Dockers needed to lose a game before finals.

The Dockers were no match for Greater Western Sydney, losing 16.13 (109) to 13.10 (88) at Manuka Oval in Canberra. It was Fremantle’s first loss since round one and they suffered another blow during the game with Hayden Young injuring his groin.

He is now expected to miss Thursday night’s blockbuster against Sydney at Optus Stadium.

Fremantle entered the game two wins clear on top of the ladder, but were a shadow of the group that has dominated the competition.

Longmuir said it was important to understand why the team struggled and while he wouldn’t allow them accept that a loss was inevitable, he also wouldn’t turn the game into something which could upset their season.

“It’s easy to fall into the trap that you’ve got to lose one sooner or later. But when you break it down into the simplistic form of preparing for each week on its merits, I don’t think that that should come into it,” he said.

“But it does and it creeps up on you sometimes. Whether that was the case today or whether GWS were just too good for us, we’ll have to do a bit of a dive.

“If you look at this game in isolation, it looks like we’ve got a bit to work on. But does this one game define you?

“We’ve been in good form for a long time. We’re on top of the ladder. Trust me, we’re not going to catastrophise one loss too much.

“We’ve already touched on and shown some clips around what let us down and where our mindset was today, and we’ll move on pretty quickly. As a coach, you try and work on trends and not events, and you don’t try and be too reactive.

“So I’m definitely not going to overreact to one loss.”

Longmuir admitted the players were adjusting to being the league leaders and the club that every other team is focusing on beating.

But he said the biggest issue against the Giants was that the players stopped performing like they have all year. He said the Dockers were nothing like the team that had won 14 games in a row.

“I thought we fought our own battles a little bit today. That’s probably a sign you’re not playing with the right mindset, or you’re not rocking up with the right mindset,” he said.

“I thought they were tougher than us around the contest. I thought we lacked the strength in the contest to hang on to the ball and to test to tackle – all of things we’ve been pretty good at all year.

“Then once they got their hands on it, they worked harder than us. It was really disappointing. I felt like we were off from the start.”