After being blown away in the first quarter, the Western Bulldogs almost pulled off the comeback of the season, narrowly going down to Fremantle by 11 points on Sunday afternoon.

While lauding the efforts of his group to stay in the match, Western Bulldogs coach Luke Beveridge says his playing group has every right to be disappointed they couldn’t record the win.

“There was plenty of upside, it was an enormous effort by our players, we were a little bit gutted.

“We worked our way back into it, I couldn’t be more proud of everyone, we almost beat the top side in round seven, I’m enormously disappointed for the players.

The undefeated Fremantle came into the match as favourites and dominated the first quarter, kicking the first five goals of the match.

MATCH REPORT: Read the full recap of Western Bulldogs v Fremantle.

With potential for the score line to blow out even further, Beveridge’s charges dug deep and clawed their way back into the match, winning the final three quarters 88-68.

“We shuffled things around a little bit, we made some tactical adjustments, we needed to.

“To our boys credit… they adjusted well and as the game wore on, they continued to persist and persist and persist and in the end we almost got it.”

The charge was led by skipper Robert Murphy, who finished with 29 disposals and six marks and continued his sparkling 2015 form.

Luke Dahlhaus was ferocious at the contest, amassing eight tackles and 24 disposals, while Tory Dickson’s seven-goal haul, including four in the final term, almost hailed him a match-winner.

“There’s plenty of positives to take out of it, sometimes it’s little things you can take out of it.

“Little things cost us, so nothing to do with system or any issues with what we’re doing, (it’s) little technical things that we can fix.”