AFL
As Fremantle’s AFL season lurches from shattering losses to promise and potential, diehard fans know to ignore the hype, hope for the best and always – always – prepare for the worst. By Martin McKenzie-Murray.
The agony of supporting the Fremantle Dockers
A year in which the Fremantle Dockers are both lampooned and excessively praised seems like a normal season to me. If pundits’ instincts are often simple and amnesiac, the sum of their fluctuating opinions of Freo still captures the supreme inconstancy of the club. So with the bemusement that comes from a long memory, I read, following Freo’s win against Gold Coast away from home last weekend, that the Dockers were now purring and an outside chance to win the flag this year.
The fickleness of the Dockers is almost mystical. It is a quality cheerfully contemptuous of anyone in the predictions game and something so deep and permanent that I’ve come to accept it as I do the rising and setting of the sun. In an average season, Fremantle will display both ferocity and meekness; joy and self-destruction; sparkle and lethargy. In some games, we’ll move the ball quickly and purposefully; in others, we’ll be sickened with indecision. There will be grit and capitulation. We will slay giants and submit to minnows.
Fremantle flatters to deceive. But they don’t mean to. The deception is entirely innocent. They possess real talent and sincere hopes, but these qualities must struggle vainly against the club’s birth curse. In this light, the players’ perseverance seems bloody heroic to me and it’s pointless, I’ve decided, to get mad.
See, today, most of our squad was born after the club’s inception. We can’t blame them and instead should salute them for showing up every week to rage against a force much more powerful than they.
We’re only mid season, but Freo’s highs and lows already plot an erratic graph. We began with the Cats in Geelong and assumed the eccentric tactic of choosing only one quarter – the third – in which to play. Naturally, this backfired, and we got spanked by almost 80 points.
The next week we lost to Sydney, once again showing the speed, fluidity and decisiveness of men playing water polo in honey. The preseason hype was pierced and there inevitably followed those vague but impassioned opinions about players’ “adjustment to the system”. One obvious point that I thought was often lost was this: just as we have skilful and admirably composed individuals – Luke Ryan and Alex Pearce at the back; Andrew Brayshaw and Caleb Serong in the middle – we also have an exceptionally young squad, many of whose frontal lobes are yet to catch up with their talent.
I’ll spare you a recitation of the games won and lost. But let me explain how, only a week after comfortably beating a top four side, we travelled to Melbourne to play an allegedly mediocre St Kilda and suffered an almost historic humiliation. It was one of the worst performances I’d seen in years, and to say that we played badly seems grossly insufficient. To have “played badly” would suggest that we played – that we were even there – when what happened was something far spookier. This wasn’t a bad game but rather a ghost ship. Our midfield was the Mary Celeste, a merchant vessel drifting on high seas, its whole crew vanished.
Now, credit to the St Kilda boys for their pressure etc etc, but what I saw was supernatural and had nothing to do with our opponent’s defensive intensity. Whichever grim spectre attended the birth of my club was there that night at Marvel Stadium, draining the life force of every player so that they almost became invisible.
I had to check the squad list to confirm that dependable ball-magnets Serong and Brayshaw were indeed playing, and by half-time we’d managed only seven points. I would’ve been angry, had I not already accepted with grace the fact of our curse.
“It raises questions of Fremantle’s legitimacy yet again, following on from their bitterly disappointing losses to Melbourne, Sydney and Geelong this season,” you could read on Fox Sports. “In one of the most utterly insipid and impotent displays, Fremantle managed just one behind in the second term and five forward entries in the third. They weren’t prepared to take the game on and played within themselves while the Saints’ pressure completely blunted their offensive capabilities.”
The week following our spooky surrender, we played a second-string Collingwood team at home. The Pies had decided to rest a slate of players, and their confidence in remaining competitive was vindicated – they won comfortably. We were now five losses and four wins, outside the eight, and, if you weren’t resigned to our birth curse like me, you might have found yourself muttering irritably about squandered talent and the necessity of sacking the coach.
But goddamn it, this is Freo, a team that can play fierce and imaginative footy just as easily as it can be dramatically dispossessed of its soul. Since our loss to Collingwood’s VFL squad, we’ve strung together three impressive victories and invited reactionary praise.
Two of those three wins were against good sides away from home, and in the driving rain on the Gold Coast last weekend there was a heroic commitment. You can tell, very quickly, when a team’s collective head is buzzing and purposeful. So it was last weekend, the purple boys fanatical in their pressure, confident in their movement of the ball from the back half, and all of it complemented by the bright and gifted improvisations of Shai Bolton.
The match was also the comeback of our club’s greatest ever player, Nat Fyfe, whose presence had been prevented by injury since last year. Now 33, and long haunted by injuries, Fyfe played the final quarter as the engaged substitute. While Freo exists under a curse, Fyfe is battling a more intimate one: time. For a few years now, his body has not complied with his enormous will.
There’s an aura about Fyfe. A rare seriousness and self-possession that one can see even without knowing he’s won the Brownlow Medal twice. It’s much the same as Geelong’s Patrick Dangerfield, a year and a bit older, another bull who in his twilight this year has reinvented himself as an influential full-time forward through sheer will.
I watched Fyfe closely. From the centre, he had several effective disposals within minutes. The veteran star had returned. But there’s a physical earnestness to him, a greater dependence these days upon crashing through tackles rather than early, silky disposals, and his physicality is now predictable, sometimes clumsy and yields free kicks. His will is still there, evidently, but the body is less receptive to it. I’m unsure what we might do with the legend – how best to milk his fading genius.
At Geelong, they’ve unleashed the inelegant vitality of Dangerfield up front – crashing packs, spilling balls, ferociously tackling. He’s been immense and I’d like to think Fyfe might be deployed similarly – though we’ve tried that before, with mixed results. We’ll see, I guess, how he is utilised in what might be his last season.
The Dockers jumper I ordered for my daughter arrived today. She’s yet to see it, as she’s still yet to understand what it represents: love, frustration and a terrible curse. We’ll see if her flattering imitation of my fandom survives. It’ll be okay if it doesn’t. While she’s still waiting for an answer to her question about why I laughed when I read last weekend that “Flagmantle” is back, I’ve got to say that within the high walls of my cynicism there grows a modest bud of hope.
Our kids are okay.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on June 7, 2025 as "Rocky in the Freo world".
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