Fair Play Purple People: Dockers Book Their Ticket Through the SCG Bearpit

Righto, I’ll say it before anyone from the eastern states does it for me — that was one hell of a performance from a Western Australian footy club in about the most hostile environment this game has to offer. Fremantle went into the SCG, got a spray from the home crowd for about a quarter and a half, then absolutely turned the screws on Sydney to book their spot in the granny.

Now look, I bleed blue and gold, everyone knows that, and there’s a little part of me that’s chewing glass watching the purple lot celebrate. But credit where it’s due — over here in the west we know how hard that travel is, we know what it’s like flying four and a half hours to play in someone else’s backyard with the whole stadium against you, and the Dockers just soaked all of that up and spat it back out in the third term.

The Nervy Start Nobody Saw Coming

For a good chunk of that first half you’d have been forgiven for thinking Freo were the ones carrying finals scar tissue, not Sydney. Fumbly, hesitant, kicking to nobody in particular — it looked like a side that had never played in front of 60-odd thousand hostile Sydney folk screaming the roof down. Which, let’s be honest, they hadn’t, not in a game of this magnitude.

The commentators kept banging on about how the SCG crowd noise was doing a number on them, and fair enough, it probably was. Big Australian rules crowds outside of WA and Victoria have a different energy to them, all pent up and desperate, and Sydney fans smelt blood early when their side got the jump. If you’re an east coast club you get used to that atmosphere. Freo don’t get many nights like that, so you could see the rust.

Then Everything Changed

But here’s the thing about this Fremantle side under their current group — they’ve shown all year they know how to control the fourth quarter of a close one. What they hadn’t shown, until last night, was the ability to completely flip a contest from meek to menacing in the space of about ten minutes. That’s the bit that should worry Hawthorn or Brisbane, whoever comes through to face them in the decider.

Once the Dockers found a bit of run through the middle and started hitting targets inside 50, Sydney had no answer. The margin blew out from a genuine arm wrestle to a comfortable 12-goal aggregate, and by the final siren the Swans looked like a team that had been out on its feet for a quarter and a half. That’s a proper statement, not a lucky one.

The Bit Where I Tip My Cap (Reluctantly)

Look, I’m not going to pretend this doesn’t sting a little bit watching a fellow WA club roll into a grand final while we’re sat at home over here doing the barbecue circuit and wondering what might’ve been this year. But there’s something in it for all of us west of the Nullarbor too — every time a WA side goes deep in September, it’s another data point for anyone still peddling the old line that footy clubs from over here can’t cut it on the road in the big moments.

People forget how brutal the travel schedule is for WA clubs. Every finals trip east is a full day gone before you even lace a boot, different time zones, different beds, different air. Fremantle have now shown, in the most hostile ground they could’ve drawn, that none of that matters if you’re the better team on the night. That’s a genuinely impressive scalp, Swans at the SCG in a prelim, and it deserves to be said plainly even by someone in an Eagles guernsey.

What It Means For The Granny

Freo now sit and wait to find out whether it’s Hawthorn or Brisbane rocking up to the MCG for the decider, and honestly either opponent brings a different puzzle. The Hawks will want to run them off their feet and play a high-octane, high-scoring affair, while the Lions will try and grind it out physically and control the corridor. Given what we saw in that third term turnaround, I reckon Freo have shown they can play either version of that game — patient when they need to be, ruthless when the door opens.

The minor premiership tag hasn’t always been kind to teams historically, plenty of top-of-the-table sides have fallen over in a Grand Final under the wieght of expectation. But this performance, digging themselves out of a genuinely hostile hole against a quality Swans side desperate for home glory, tells you this group has got some genuine ticker to go with the talent.

A Word On The Bigger Picture

There’s a broader conversation here too about how these finals are scheduled and where WA clubs end up playing them, and I won’t bang on about that too long because nobody wants to hear an Eagles fan whinge about fixturing on the week his cross-town rivals just won a famous final. But it is worth noting, again, how good this result is for the WA footy ecosystem broadly. Kids over here watching Fremantle front up in Sydney and come out the other side will grow up believing that’s a normal thing for a club from the west to do. That matters more than people probably realise.

Fair Play, Dockers

So here we are. Fremantle Football Club, into their second grand final, having just produced maybe the most complete quarter and a half of finals footy this competition has seen all September. It wasn’t pretty for the first half, and there were moments Swans fans would’ve been licking their lips thinking an upset was on. But footy’s a four-quarter game, and Freo remembered that when it mattered most.

As a West Coast supporter I’ll be watching that grand final with mixed feelings, some genuine pride in a fellow WA club doing something special, and some quiet grumbling that it’s not us out there. But full credit to the Dockers — they earned this one the hard way, in the away den, against a desperate opponent, and nobody east of the border can take that away from them.