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.
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.
