MARK HARVEY knew he had a very big problem. He says now that he knew it almost immediately. Fremantle had just run out of steam, losing to Collingwood in the first game of the season and, to the rookie coach's eye, his players did not look fit enough to perform on the MCG.

He spoke to his assistant, Chris Bond, about it. The following week against Hawthorn, at Subiaco, Harvey felt his players looked physically inferior. When Richmond thrashed Fremantle at Subiaco in round four, the coach took the decision that the club had an on-field crisis on its hands and he went to the board and outlined it.

"I don't want this to be seen as an excuse for me," says Harvey, "but what came out of my first pre-season as the pilot and not the co-pilot was that we had a significant problem in fitness and strength.

"We were not strong enough and our inability to win the game when it needed it most was so obvious. I don't want to be critical of the old fitness regime either, but as the weeks went on, I saw that what I was thinking was right.

"I knew we had a problem. I could see it three or four weeks into the season - earlier. I went to the board and I explained it very early on and, yes, people asked: 'How can that be?' "

It could equally be asked of the 43-year-old, a veteran of just 29 games as a senior coach although more than 200 as an assistant, why he never conveyed his belief during the various and occasionally memorable and critical media grillings he received. And there were plenty, as the Dockers proceeded to finish 14th and only enhance their reputation as unreliable, undisciplined and uncommitted.

Two seasons earlier, Mark Thompson's Cats made their disenchantment with their strength and conditioning guru well and truly known as Geelong failed to deliver on expectation. Geelong's review of its football operation was widespread, relatively public and included the coach.

But Fremantle's fitness review was kept private, even from the players. Harvey's long-time Essendon teammate Thompson called him occasionally to buck him up, but they never compared notes on fitness.

The review did not include Harvey, according to the man himself. He had enough to deal with in terms of being scrutinised for his often monosyllabic, old-school defensiveness - he was already being reviewed by commentators and the public.

"The responsibility of a senior coach is to be able to deal with that and so I dealt with it the way I did," Harvey says now.

"In July, we conducted a review of the entire football department. The team was willing, they were willing and competitive, but the players were kept away from it and what we were reviewing. But the alarm bells were ringing."

And Fremantle, like Harvey, knew it had a problem with the coach. No one at the club, not president Rick Hart and certainly not Harvey, would concede to The Sunday Age that the coach himself was reviewed or questioned even at his end-of-season presentation to the board. But it is certainly accepted by all concerned that the taciturn armour worn by the Dockers' fifth coach in 14 years had to be shed.

The club has spent an estimated extra $800,000 transforming its football, fitness and medical structures, but it has also done some significant work with Harvey and his public performance skills, work it is less forthcoming about.

That problem became glaringly obvious after the Dockers' horrific final-term capitulation against Melbourne in round seven. President Hart was unimpressed that the coach had been abandoned by the club's relatively threadbare media department and struggled disastrously on back-to-back football programs in Melbourne after the Demons' game.

The president says now it was "timely" that, soon afterwards, the club brought in a new media executive, the experienced former journalist Luke Morfesse who is married to Perth's Channel Nine news anchor and former groundbreaking Channel Seven football reporter Dixie Marshall, the AFL's first woman boundary commentator.

Morfesse was given Harvey as priority No. 1. On top of this, Harvey will also work with a new media consultant away from the club. "He was a first year coach last season," said Hart. "People forget that."

And yet, quite apart from his eight seasons as Kevin Sheedy's assistant, two at the Dockers and more than 200 games and three premierships as a player, Harvey has also worked in all forms of the football media. When asked why he struggled so much with that side of it, the coach claims nothing can compare with the daily challenges of being a senior coach.

He also believes he simply wasn't that bad during his performances on On The Couch and Footy Classified. "I had some feedback, including from my football department, that I handled it OK," he says. I put it to him again that he could have talked about his strength and fitness worries and diverted attention from what was perceived by most as his own inadequacies.

"No other experience can prepare you for senior coaching," says Harvey. "My real job is to coach the team and to deal with the team and they are the priority and they didn't need to hear that. I said I don't want to be making excuses.

"There are things you just can't talk publicly about and, for me, the players are also one of those things. I know, they know, they have to change too. Yes, there were players who were undisciplined and from a leadership point of view you need them on the field."

Harvey said he has learned to delegate and has agreed to work on his "fifth quarter" skills, but it is obvious this will never become a passion."I will talk to people," he conceded, "and I will learn to deal with that sort of thing on a regular basis and I won't find myself in that situation again."

Morfesse sits in on Harvey's 80-minute conversation with The Sun-day Age and joins us for a congenial seafood lunch among the fishing boats docked at Fremantle.

But it is an easygoing and charming Harvey who holds court on the day. The interview finished, we gossip about football people, media acquaintances, Kevin Sheedy's new book, children, schools and fishing. Harvey signs an autograph or three and is unrecognisable from the tortured, monosyllabic frontman who could not answer Robert Walls' repeated On The Couch question: "What does the Fremantle Football Club stand for?"

And it was Harvey who called me back in September to ask why I suggested that 2009 could be his last season as Fremantle coach. Those sorts of comments, he said then, do not help a man's reputation - certainly not in this brutal game.

I told him where I thought he had gone wrong and he disagreed with most of it, but we agreed to keep the lines of communication open.

Towards the end of this interview, Harvey, who sits at his desk behind a laptop, which he says (contradicting football folklore) he uses all the time, decides to make his position clear.

"There are two types of AFL coaches," he says. "There are coaches who come in and can build a club from the bottom up with young players and there are coaches who go out and get players from other clubs and remain thereabouts every year.

"I am the first type of coach. In the past, this club probably has gone the other way and as it turned out, it never proved the right ingredient for the ultimate success. We got close, but only close."

Harvey said he pushed that mantra strongly when interviewed for the job at the end of last season and believes he sold his philosphy well. He also denies his appointment was rushed through and without due diligence carried out. In fact, he says, he underwent rigorous psychological testing and jokes that the results presented him as unstable.

It is put to Harvey that it is a bit rich for him to criticise the list top-up philosophy given his early decision to recruit ageing Bomber Mark Johnson along with his younger teammate Kepler Bradley.

"Look, they were picks 55 (Johnson) and 69 (Bradley)," said Harvey. "Bradley was 21 (in fact just 22) when we took him and he is going to be a good player. With Mark Johnson, what I was trying to do was bring a player into the group who played with the intent and preparation admirable for a player of his size.

"He had injury problems, but we saw in the last three games what he could do and taking him was not about trying to win a premiership or chase a top-four spot.

"But we did do that in the past and we were that sort of club." Harvey pauses before opining: "The interesting point about when anyone becomes a coach, an AFL coach, is that it happens for a reason and it's not because things have been successful."

As a result of the review back in July, the club has completely reshaped and bolstered its football department with notable changes to the Dockers' strength and conditioning team now headed by Jason Weber, the former national physical performance coach for the Wallabies.

Weber, with the Socceroos' fitness coach and head of sports science, Darren Burgess, oversaw the mid-season review before taking the job, while Burgess has been retained as a consultant. Former Port Adelaide strength and conditioning coach, Chris Spinks, has also joined the multimillion-dollar team.

Harvey said the 2009 pre-season, now well under way, is a tranformation, but he will not give much away. "Everyone seems to want to find an edge in this area," he says. "But the volume has certainly increased. On average, players are running five or 10 kilometres more each week and they are using different kinds of weights."

Harvey agrees it is up to him now. He has a world class fitness team in place and 14 new players with no Peter Bell, Shaun McManus or the Carr brothers. There are new assistant coaches, a new football boss with Chris Bond replacing Robert Shaw, a new chief executive and an experienced media minder. He can no longer blame mistakes from the past as he rebuilds a team in his own image.

If he were to be asked today what the Fremantle Football Club stood for, Harvey would probably deliver the same line he delivered to a group of corporate supporters he addressed at the club early this month as he pointed to the empty trophy cabinet he walks past every day when he arrives at work.

Well, not quite empty. There are the winning West Australian derbies and once the AFL gets its act together, Rhys Palmer's Rising Star trophy will be delivered for display.

"It's what drives me every day," says Harvey. "It irks me and it irks me every day. But it is not the worst thing about the job. For me, it is the best part about it. What greater challenge for a coach than this football club's first premiership?"