Nine Blazers for Gawny, But Let’s Talk About Freo’s Five

Fair play where it’s due, Max Gawn pulling on his ninth All-Australian blazer is the sort of thing you tell your grandkids about, assuming they still play footy by then and haven’t all switched to some hybrid Origin concept the AFL’s cooked up. But over here in the west we’ve got a bit to say too, because Fremantle topping the competition with five selections is the real story buried under all the Gawn love-in, and I reckon it’s worth digging out.

Gawny’s Ninth is Genuinely Rare Air

Let’s not be churlish about it. Nine blazers is an outrageous number for a ruckman, a position that chews blokes up and spits them out by their early thirties most of the time. Gawn’s managed to stay relevant, dominant even, well past when most big men are hobbling round doing media work instead of taking bounces. Being handed the captaincy of the squad on top of it just underlines where he sits in the pecking order of all-time greats at his craft. You’d be a mug to argue otherwise, and I’m not going to sit here and pretend the bloke isn’t an icon of our game, because he clearly is.

That said, and there’s always a that said with us sandgropers, isn’t there, it does feel like every single season the eastern states media finds itself a fresh angle to lavish on a Victorian superstar while the stuff happening over here in the west gets a cursory mention down in paragraph nine. Gawn deserves his flowers. He just doesn’t need all of ours too.

Fremantle’s Five is the Actual Headline

Five All-Australians out of one club, topping the entire competition, is not a small thing. That’s a genuine statement about the depth and quality building down at Freo, and if a Victorian club had managed the same feat you’d have every commentator in Melbourne doing backflips about a changing of the guard. Instead it rates a mention almost as an afterthought, tucked in under the Gawn headline like it’s the support act.

I’m not going to pretend I’ve got no skin in this game, being an Eagles man through and through, and there’s a small, petty part of me that finds it mildly funny watching another WA club cop the same treatment we’ve copped for years. But mostly it just confirms what we’ve been saying forever: footy excellence west of the Nullarbor doesn’t get talked about with the same excitement unless it’s dressed up as an underdog story or completely impossible to ignore.

The Travel Factor Nobody East of the Border Wants to Discuss

Every year the WA clubs, Freo included, cart themselves across three time zones more than anyone else in the comp and somehow still manage to produce All-Australian quality footy. Five blazers this season is a decent rebuttal to anyone who reckons the travel doesn’t matter, or that it’s some sort of excuse we wheel out when it suits. It’s not an excuse when your side’s still pumping out elite talent despite spending half the season living out of a suitcae and adjusting to different climates on back-to-back weekends.

Meanwhile the Victorian clubs get to sleep in their own beds most weeks and cop none of the same scrutiny about how that might factor into form and fitness. Not having a crack at Gawn or Melbourne here, that’s just the reality of the fixture, but it does make you wonder how the ledger might look if everyone was playing on a truly level park.

Indigenous Round Numbers a Genuine Bright Spot

Away from the parochial stuff, five Indigenous players in the squad including Kysaiah Pickett is something worth sitting with for a second, because it’s a proper record and it says plenty about the calibre of talent coming through and finally getting the recognition it deserves. Footy’s always been better when it reflects the full breadth of who plays it, and results like this one feel like genuine progress rather than a box-ticking exercise. Good on the panel for getting that one right.

Where’s the Love for the West Coast Contingent?

Look, I won’t pretend we had a squad full of contenders this year, it’s been a rebuilding phase and everyone knows it, so I’m not going to sit here whinging that Eagles were snubbed when realistically the results haven’t been there. But it does sting a little watching the coverage roll out with barely a mention of anything happening west of Ballarat except Fremantle, who thoroughly earned their spot in the conversation this time round.

What gets my goat more than anything is the framing. Gawn’s blazer gets the big bold headline treatment nationally, as it should to be fair, he’s earned it. But Freo’s five selections, an actual competition-topping tally, gets treated like statistical trivia rather than the headline it deserves to be in its own right. You could argue that’s just how these things shake out when one bloke’s chasing a record number, but it does feel like a pattern that repeats itself every single year regardless of who’s involved.

What This Actually Means Going Forward

For Melbourne, Gawn’s continued brilliance is a reminder their premiership window, while looking a bit rusty of late, still has genuine star power at its core. Doesn’t fix everything that’s gone wrong for them this year, but it’s something solid to build the rebuild around, if that’s even the right word for a club that won it all not that long ago.

For Fremantle, five All-Australians and the minor premiership is about as strong a platform as you could ask for heading into September. The pressure now sits squarely on them to convert that individual and collective form into the flag their list has been building towards. Talk’s cheap this time of year, and blazers don’t win prelims.

And for the rest of us out here in the west, watching on with equal parts admiration and mild exasperation, it’s another reminder that the national conversation still runs through Victoria first, even when the numbers say otherwise. Doesn’t mean Gawn’s achievement isn’t deserved, it absolutely is. Just means maybe next time Freo tops the All-Australian count outright, it gets its own headline instead of playing support act to someone else’s blazer count. Fair’s fair.