Pundits have put the acid on Fremantle after its fade-out defeat to the Western Bulldogs as the decision to give club champion Nat Fyfe a two-year contract extension has come under the spotlight.

The Dockers conceded seven of the last nine goals to the Dogs to go down by 29 points at Marvel Stadium and deal a blow to their finals prospects, now sitting a game and healthy percentage outside the top eight.

Speaking on Fox Footy’s The First Crack, Kangaroos great David King said Freo was “fast becoming frauds,” lamenting why Justin Longmuir didn’t insert Luke Jackson into the ruck in the fourth quarter in a bid to combat the Dogs’ momentum.

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“Why didn’t they put Jackson in the ruck when the game was sliding? He’s been the man the previous couple of weeks, we’ve talked about him a lot,” King said.

“I thought it was really poor, it was a game in the balance, you get your playmakers where the footy is.”

Fyfe meanwhile was subbed out at three-quarter time due to a recurring foot problem to put his immediate playing future in doubt.

It continues the two-time Brownlow medallist’s bad run with injury in recent times, playing just 16 of the last 39 games including issues with plantar fasciitis in 2023.

Despite this, the 31-year old in May was given a two-year contract extension with Freo after he’d strung several games together in a decision AFL journalist Damian Barrett believes the club will ultimately regret.

“It’s an issue isn’t it?,” Barrett said on Channel 9’s Sunday Footy Show.

“It’s an issue because he hasn’t played a lot of football in recent seasons. His form was not good in this particular game and as we learnt two weeks ago, he has two more seasons of contract.

“You don’t want to talk down the greats of the game, and we talk about hall of famers, he will be first ballot. But this is the type of mistake that West Coast has made and got itself into this situation.

“I don’t feel it’s talking him down. Give him one more year absolutely but put caveats on it to go into 2025, not to just guarantee that from a 2023 perspective when he has already missed a lot of footy in the past two years.”

Having already questioned it last month, dual All-Australian Kane Cornes was again critical of the move to extend Fyfe’s deal until 2025.

“That’s bizarre, isn’t it?” Cornes posed on The Sunday Footy Show.

“This isn’t hindsight, we said this at the time, it’s 2023 not 2019 for Nat Fyfe. That was a decision that needed to be made at the end of the year, not now.

“It is going to be a bit of an elephant in the room for them with how much footy he misses and it was hard to watch yesterday.”