AFL
He dared to dream and now the author can slumber easily as his beloved Fremantle FC contests the AFL finals, in a season where every top eight team is a realistic chance for the flag. By Martin McKenzie-Murray.
Can Fremantle’s purple patch see them to a flag?
To enter Marvel Stadium on a sunny afternoon is a rude experience, roughly the opposite of a trapped miner who’s just found the surface. Last Sunday, Melbourne gloriously previewed spring and the flock that made its way to the ground did so beneath bright, unblemished skies – only to enter a gloomy but gaudily lit cave.
The stadium opened in 2000 with a retractable roof – a technology once celebrated for its novelty but which has long invited controversy and confusion. It was once declared the roof would only close in anticipation of bad weather, but the shadows cast upon the field on sunny days made for blighted TV viewing and sufficient complaints that in 2019 the AFL decided to have it permanently closed on match days – irrespective of the weather or if the match was day or night.
Anyway, a rare and beautiful thing happened at Marvel Stadium last weekend and I won’t distract from it much longer with this roof business, though it has never been clear to me that the issue of shadows is any worse here than they are at any other ground.
It was the final round of the season, and the Western Bulldogs were hosting Fremantle in their strange bat lair. Such was the ladder that we had here an early elimination final: to the winner went a finals position, while the loser would have to rely upon the unlikely event of Gold Coast falling to the execrable Essendon.
Few liked our chances, and nor did I, though I thought the bookies’ overwhelming favouritism of the Dogs was slightly insulting. It was also badly wrong.
In the first quarter, the Dogs enjoyed territorial dominance and the score threatened to become desperate. The second quarter, though, was glorious. One of the best Fremantle has played all season and certainly the most profitable – seven goals to the Dogs’ nil. Victory was never really a prospect for the hosts after that.
Of Freo’s principal forwards, we have Josh Treacy, Patrick Voss and Jye Amiss. Treacy has now established himself as one of the league’s best; Voss, discarded by Essendon without having played a game, has blossomed. While both exude ferocity and purpose, Amiss has often looked like a boy who’s lost his parents in a crowded shopping mall.
Poor Amiss has been embarrassed by his name this year, but much worse than his inaccuracy has been his invisibility – in several matches this year he hasn’t had his first touch until well into the third quarter. Where Treacy has routinely offered leads and effectively used his weight against his defender, and Voss has patrolled the field with the same aura as Liam Neeson hunting his wife’s killer, Amiss has seemed adrift, unsure, overwhelmed.
Until last Sunday. It was a spectacular return to form – three goals before half-time, including a magic dribbler from the pocket.
It all worked. We won the clearances; the freakish Sam Darcy was kept goalless by our captain – Alex “Athletic Jesus” Pearce. From the second quarter, the midfield was possessed of a skilful daring that the Dogs’ notoriously fickle defence couldn’t touch. Our boys up front were well fed.
Our best is as good as anyone’s, which might sound like partisan bluster except that I think just about anyone could win the flag this year. Accounting for the advantages of finishing top four, the prospects of the eight seem more even than I’ve ever known them to be.
Treacy’s recent, seemingly exponential development seems to have at last answered our agonising post-Pavlich hole, and in Voss we have another powerful lightning rod for passes inside 50, as well as a replacement for Hayden Ballantyne.
A notorious pest, Ballantyne became a beloved mascot by virtue of everyone else hating him. Similarly, in his aggression and uninhibited celebrations, not to mention his improving set shot and untiring presentation of leads, Patrick “The Prancing Pony” Voss has become cherished – all the more so for having been a castaway.
Voss is not only gifted and strong. The bloke plays with an untiring zealotry that I like to think is partly an act of gratitude for Freo’s faith in him, and just as much an attempt to embarrass Essendon’s lack of it. Right there, in that passionate mix of gratitude and vengeance, you have the soul of a talisman.
As for the Bulldogs: their virtues have been much remarked upon this season and much enjoyed by me. They possess several players of supreme talent and are committed to a glorious style, but their defence is rubbish. While they were the highest scoring team this season, they also failed to beat any top eight side except GWS – their virtues and flaws hang suspended, or at least they did until their failure to make the eight.
“Who’s Australia’s greatest fraud?” my friend next to me asked, and I assumed the sincerity of his question.
“Skase? Bond?”
“Sure,” he said, “and Belle Gibson?”
“I guess she’s up there,” I said.
“And where do you think this Dogs side ranks?”
Ouch.
Within the gloom of the stadium, there was the heavier gloom of the Doggies fans around me – the ones irritated by my jubilance but likely more annoyed by their being mugged by expectations again.
It’s a fine line between success and public vilification, especially this year. Had Justin Longmuir’s Fremantle failed, once again, to qualify for finals, I can only imagine the righteous fury and corresponding headlines. But only one match separated us from finishing sixth or ninth.
Fine margins, but still wide enough to write professional obituaries in.
Too tentative, too immature, too weak in the clutch – so the arguments against Freo went, and they were often true. I’d add, of course, what I believe to have been our birth curse – some founding deformity that still haunts us regardless of the acuity of our list management.
But this year, while still bedevilled by inconsistency – and which team hasn’t been? – we’ve shown, on average, more flair than constipation. The kids are blooming (rookie Murphy Reid has been stunning) and we’ve better developed the habit of winning games from a losing position, and withstanding fierce comebacks. There’s more grit and confidence this year, and the recently acquired Shai Bolton – who works as a kind of inspired, if sometimes indulgent, improvisation artist – has the power to creatively remodel our attack when we run low on imagination.
Can the Freo fan dream? Of course. Should they? Well, that’s a question for a priest. The volatility of our season is familiar, and so too our eligibility for finals hinging upon the last round, but fickleness is not unique to us this year. God forbid I make an argument for Freo’s dependability, but we have won 12 of our previous 14 games.
That’s a nice bed for dreaming in, even if the longer history of our 30 years counsels against it. One doesn’t decide to dream, though. It’s involuntary. “Just one”, read the T-shirt of a Freo fan I saw as I entered the ground.
Just one flag. It’s a modest dream. He’ll surely want another, I thought, after the first. You must get a taste for it, right? But hey – baby steps. It starts with just one. We’ve been waiting a while.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on August 30, 2025 as "Purple patch".
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