Fremantle coach Justin Longmuir has revealed he urged his players to be ruthless and put North Melbourne to the sword in a passionate half-time address on their way to a record-breaking victory.

Longmuir said the plea to players even went against his own philosophy as a coach.

But it drove his players to produce the club’s biggest-ever winning margin, a 124-point thumping of the Kangaroos in Bunbury.

The Dockers produced a record winning margin of 124 points and kicked a club record 19 goals in a row during the 24.11 (155) to 4.7 (31) victory.

Fremantle’s biggest win this season was 60 points against Richmond and the players have often been frustrated that they have allowed teams to make the scoreboard respectable.

Longmuir revealed he addressed that issue at half-time when they led by 54 points and Fremantle didn’t allow North Melbourne to kick another goal for the entire day.

“It was pleasing. At half time, I spoke about being in this situation before, and probably talked in language that takes us away from the process, and almost try too hard. But I just thought we stuck to the plan today. We were ruthless with the way we played,” he said.

“I’ve seen us play better. But I think we played as close to 120 minutes today as what we probably could have thought.”

The Dockers have now won 12 games in a row and not only sit on top of the ladder, they also have a strangehold on the top two following losses by Hawthorn and Geelong in recent days.

Hayden Young came back from concussion and had a big game with 23 possessions, seven clearances and two goals, while Longmuir also expects Caleb Serong, Brennan Cox and Matthew Johnson to return from injury after the bye.

Longmuir is confident Fremantle can get even better in the second half of the year.

“We’re not our best version yet,” he said.

“So that’s the challenge for us as a playing group. It’s to remain hungry and keep looking, set, keep searching for areas we can improve, because everyone below us on the ladder is doing exactly that.

“So I don’t sit here and think, “Oh, we’re our best version yet. Through personnel, through the way we’re playing, we’ve got areas of our game that we can get better at. That’s what we’ve got to strive to do.”

North Melbourne coach Alastair Clarkson was left shell-shocked by the way Fremantle tore his team apart.

He admitted his players were powerless to stop the onslaught.

“Fremantle with good and we were dreadful, and perhaps even a little bit, a bit of shame. We want to come over here and be putting on a better performance than what we did today,” he said.

“We just couldn’t get the game at any stage on on our terms. Usually there’s some ebbs and flows in the game, and you can get yourself back into the contest, but we just couldn’t find a way to get back back into the contest, which was really disappointing.

“It was just our resilience. It’s hard to explain, other than we haven’t played any footy for two weeks. How often do we see that a team is just so poor coming back from from a bye and having a rest. You get out of your routine and you get out of your resilient tough approach, and we were just nowhere in that space today.”