The AFL season begins in a couple of weeks, and my daughter, somehow sensitive to this, told me recently Fremantle could win it. I didn’t invite her prediction, nor do I understand where it came from, and given her tender age I refrained from describing the curse that I’ve come to believe haunts the club and will likely deny us a flag this year and in all the years following.
Instead, I swallowed my bitter fatalism and reflected her optimism. She’s still too young for me to have The Chat with her about the Dockers and the sad submission of my fandom. My daughter has known disappointment, to be sure, but her experience of it has thus far been largely trivial and she’s blissfully unaware it could become a permanent state.
That will change, but for now she resides in her glorious castle of innocence oblivious to curses and ligament damage and the slow athletic fading of icons. Oblivious to fourth-quarter collapses and withdrawn promises.
See, round 21 last year is a fresh memory for me. We were playing Essendon at the MCG, and with perhaps 15 minutes to go we had a comfortable lead. The live ladder had us third, with only three matches remaining in the regular season. A top-four spot seemed likely, if not assured. Surrounded by Bombers fans, my enthusiasm might have seemed obnoxious.
And premature. We lost that game by a point, and then the remaining three, having also lost to injury the spine of our team in Alex Pearce, Sean Darcy and Josh Treacy. It’s pathetic to invoke a live ladder, but in the final quarter that afternoon we were third and yet we would finish the season 10th.
Humbled and disconsolate after the Essendon match, I wandered the city. In a moment of bathos and self pity, I stopped before St Patrick’s Cathedral, a beautiful place upon which I projected my bitterness. The church is named for the patron saint of Ireland and, as I sat before it, I pondered who Freo’s equivalent might be if indeed they had one.
the year Fremantle finally defies the curse of unknown origin and mysterious in its transmission, but a curse nonetheless.
I asked a friend about his feelings. A fellow Freo neurotic and former Tame Impala guitarist, I’m comfortable saying Nick Allbrook must be the only person to have performed on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon while wearing a Dockers scarf vintage colours, too: purple, green and red. He also once recorded a cover of our theme song, which I’ve never listened to on account of being allergic to the original.
