I have woken up this morning in a (purple) haze as the realisation slowly sinks in that my team, the Fremantle Dockers, will be playing in the AFL Grand Final next Saturday. And, if Freo play as well as they did to emphatically dispatch Sydney at the cauldron that is Subiaco Oval last night, they are every chance to be the 2013 AFL Premiers.
An AFL Premiership win for the Fremantle Football Club and its loyal band of supporters would mean so much, to so many. I can’t speak for all Freo fans of course but here is what seeing Pav and the boys holding aloft the Premiership Cup would mean to me and why.
I was a primary school kid in Perth in the 80s so I grew up with the WAFL as the centre of my football universe. While not being a “real” Freo person (which is an unwritten source of status for those modern day Freo supporters who live in and around the heart of Fremantle) I was a dedicated South Fremantle supporter and took a passing interest in the VFL – mainly to see how former South Fremantle players were faring having been lured east by big money and the bright lights (Hardie, Dorotich, Bairstow etc).
Then in 1987 football in WA changed forever with the admission of the West Coast Eagles into what was still known as the VFL. Despite being just a kid, this change irked me as I knew that the competition that I loved would never be the same again as the VFL lurched towards being a truly national competition – taking all the top WA talent with it and rendering the WAFL a second tier competition in the eyes of WA footy fans (don’t get me wrong – this has been great for football – but was hard to take as 12 year old!).
So I just never warmed to the Eagles and I drifted into something of an aussie rules wilderness for some years. Watching VFL/AFL football without supporting a particular team and remaining loyal to South Fremantle when interest in them and the entire WAFL had dwindled – it felt hollow.
Furthermore, and much to my chagrin at the time, it seemed to me that many of the stars of the West Coast Eagles were recruited from South Fremantle and East Fremantle (the original WA Derby arch rivals). Matera, Sumich, Worsfold, Mainwaring, Hart and Brennan to name a few were products of Fremantle, but the West Coast Eagles to me never felt like a club to which South and East Fremantle supporters belonged.
This background is important, as Fremantle (the city/region) has a proud, strong and successful football history of which many on the east coast are unaware and which non-Docker supporting West Australians have forgotten or dismissed. South Fremantle and East Fremantle are traditionally two of the most successful and powerful sides in the history of the WAFL. The juxtaposition of that heritage with the Dockers’ perennial under-achievement and AFL laughing stock status has been a bitter pill to swallow for the diehard fans.
There was talk from the earliest days of West Coast’s existence that a second WA team would join the VFL/AFL and it was universally acknowledged that it would be a Fremantle side. I will bide my time, I always thought to myself, and follow a Freo side when they join.
I was roused from my football hibernation when in 1995 the Fremantle Football Club was born and we finally had our own team competing at the highest level. But the establishment of the club and assembly of its list seemed rushed, ad hoc and somewhat amateurish.
Fremantle’s inability to persuade established AFL players to join its inaugural squad meant that in that first year our side comprised a spare parts collection of fringe players/journeymen from other AFL clubs, untried youngsters and obscure players plucked from the WAFL.
Perversely, this was a big part of what I loved about being a Freo supporter. We were quirky and different. There was no other club quite like Freo with our purple and green colours, pre-game anchor raising ceremony, and universally mocked club song which seemed to fit just perfectly with our unique style of play (‘chip and draw’ – well ahead of its time, thanks to coach Gerard Neesham’s water polo pedigree) and occasionally brilliant but often erratic players. These were the aspects that Freo supporters loved about the club but which in equal measures drew scorn directed fiercely at our club and supporters.
It’s one thing to be unique and eccentric when your club is winning games and building respect off field, but it made Fremantle an even bigger target of derision as year after year it failed to win more than a handful of games.
This was easier for Freo supporters to handle in the first couple of seasons as we mostly had an innate, and in retrospect clearly misguided, belief that the club would build a successful foundation and mature as a side to be a finals contender soon enough. Yes in those early years Freo would show occasional glimpses of brilliance that would seduce its fans to believe that our fortunes were starting to turn around and that next year would be our year.
So let’s fast forward from Freo’s formative and exciting yet largely fruitless first few seasons through to a long patch of poor to mediocre seasons up to the mid 2000s. This was a defining period for the club’s supporters as our early and endearing but somewhat naïve optimism faded. In fact many Freo supporters now viewed the team’s prospects through a pessimistic lens – which based upon my pop psychological analysis, emerged as a self-protection mechanism by fans who could no longer bounce back as easily from having raised hopes dashed year after year.
This sad state of affairs was compounded by the self inflicted wounds of the Dockers’ woeful list management. The long list of poor or average Fremantle players who were traded or delisted and then went on to star at rival AFL clubs has been very well documented, with Freo almost always on the losing end of a trade deal.
The continued lack of success for Fremantle was exacerbated by the success of our arrogant older brother up the road – West Coast. Their supporters revelled in rubbing the Eagles’ success and Freo’s lack thereof in our face. This in turn spurned the phenomenon of most Freo supporters despising the Eagles and supporting anyone who played against them – state loyalties counted for nought.
In hindsight and in all honesty many Freo supporters admired West Coast’s achievements, we wished our club could emulate their premiership success and we carried around little chips on our shoulders during this period. Our supporters’ fixation on West Coast and beating them also highlighted that the culture of our club had a long way to go, as the main game is premierships, not beating your cross town rivals.
The assertion that Fremantle Football Club and its supporters accepted mediocrity was levelled on the national stage in 2003 when the Dockers finally made their first ever finals series. By finishing fifth Fremantle booked a home final at “the house of pain” and went in favourites to beat Essendon. The finals savvy Bombers went on to dismantle Fremantle – unceremoniously bundling them out of the finals. As they trudged off Subiaco Oval the Fremantle players were given a standing ovation by their success starved fans. Freo supporters were widely condemned for what that gesture symbolised about the culture of the club. I suspect many Freo diehards were relieved that their side had and could make the finals and felt that greater success was at long last just around the corner … it wasn’t.
For a club so starved of success it is interesting to note that when the Fremantle Football Club Board and management have tried to make improvements both on and off field, it has usually been met with loud resistance from pockets of the supporter base. There was strong opposition to moving from a training base at Fremantle Oval to a state of the art facility at Cockburn, to the appointment of Ross Lyon as coach/sacking of Mark Harvey, and the change in Fremantle’s guernsey to what most would consider a more aesthetically pleasing and commercially viable colour scheme and design.
Perhaps this demonstrates that Fremantle supporters are intensely passionate about their club and feel a strong sense of ownership. It also highlights a catch-22 whereby the Dockers are criticised for having a lack of history and substance but then when its supporters try to protect and defend the history that has been built up they are criticised for it.
In 2006 many Freo supporters yet again thought our time had come, finishing the season with nine consecutive wins to then make a preliminary final for the first time, against the reigning premiers Sydney. A win would set up a dream grand final – a Western Derby.
With a mature and big bodied side Freo’s list had the makings of a premiership contender. But after keeping pace with the Swans for the first three quarters, the Swans drew clear on their home turf to win by six goals. But success was just around the corner for Freo, right?
Wrong. In 2007 the Dockers were never in the running. Their veterans were in decline and the pipeline of emerging talent was seemingly dry. While never publicly stating it, the club had decided the right course of action was to begin a rebuild … yet again.
Inevitably Freo struggled over the ensuing seasons, with new coach Mark Harvey set the unenviable task of rebuilding a club whose supporters were starved of success and impatient for results. We had seen this cycle all before, multiple times.
Then came the watershed moment that perhaps will in years to come be remembered as a defining event of the club. Harvey, with a year to run on his contract, was sacked and replaced by St Kilda coach Ross Lyon. Many Freo supporters were outraged and opposed to Lyon’s appointment. However, shrewd outside observers may have noted two things – the appointment of Lyon had a ruthlessness rarely demonstrated before by the Dockers and Lyon’s coaching had delivered sustained success (albeit not a premiership) with a modestly talented Saints side.
In Lyon’s first season last year, Fremantle looked a vastly better side as the youngsters recruited and blooded under Harvey’s regime came of age, players learned and adjusted to Lyon’s astute game plan and the team culture improved.
Unexpectedly beating the previous year’s premiers Geelong in an elimination final at the MCG was a sign that something had changed and for the better – this was no longer the Freo of old. Or was this yet another cruel false dawn? Fremantle went on to lose the following week against the Crows. But you got the sense that this time around nobody associated with the club was satisfied with having just made the finals and having put up a gallant effort.
The hard edge of this Fremantle club was underscored in the first week of this year’s finals when controversially assigned to play the Cats in Geelong, Fremantle systematically worked its way to an historic win, setting up a crucial week off and home preliminary final against Sydney. We all know how that went!
So while it’s hard to articulate succinctly, winning the premiership on the last Saturday in September would mean so much to so many Fremantle supporters. Freo people who have stuck by their club through a lot of hard times and with no ultimate success.
Fans who band together with great camaraderie when in the minority at away games and who create a sea of purple and an unrivalled atmosphere at home games with a Freo chant that makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up.
That knowing look you give a Freo stranger who you met at or on the way to a game – it doesn’t need to be spoken – you both know what it means to be a Freo person. We are a community.
Freo fans who have cheered on and loved the contribution of club stalwarts like Ben Allan, Peter Bell, Shaun McManus, Shane Parker, Paul Hasleby and Dale Kickett, cult heroes like Clive Waterhouse and Scotty Chisolm, and loyal current day servants like Pav, McPharlin and Sandi.
To feel a small part of winning that first premiership, something that many of us never dared to dream after years of dashed hopes, to have our club earn the respect of the football community and to finally restore the proud Australian Rules tradition of Fremantle to its rightful standing.
There is a big job to be done on Saturday – go well Freo – we are all behind you.