Prior to Fremantle’s rare away match at Optus Stadium against North Melbourne, it’s time to take a look at Fremantle’s season just after the mid-season checkpoint.
The Dockers came into this season with high expectations. Coming off a season where they sat in the top 4 up until a disastrous final month of the season, they’d recruited Richmond star Shai Bolton in the off-season and were expecting to be in premiership contention.
However after a rough 0-2 start with losses to Geelong and Sydney, and more rough losses to Melbourne and St Kilda, the Dockers sat 4-5 and looking lost after Round 9.
Freo hit back big time in the following 3 games, with two impressive away victories to GWS and the high flying Gold Coast, with a convincing defeat of Port Adelaide in the middle of that. The Dockers now sit 7-5, which is maybe slightly under par for where they expected to be.
After the horrific defeat of St Kilda, the barbarians were at the gate, people were calling for coach Justin Longmuir to be sacked and the list to be overhauled. Fast forward to now and the fans are acting like that never happened.
Recency bias is true I guess.
My strong opinion is that the Dockers list isn’t quite as good as people thought it was at the start of the season. Players like Sean Darcy, Brennan Cox and Sam Switkowski would’ve be considered top players in their position to begin this season, but they have not shown that short of form this year.
Even some more fringe players. Guys like Heath Chapman, Jeremy Sharp, Jye Amiss and even draftee Murphy Reid have all shown a lot of promise this season, but aren’t quite the stars and locked in Best 22 players a lot of the Dockers fanbase makes them out to be.
It’s important as a fanbase not to get carried away sometimes, yes the last 3 weeks have been great for the Dockers, but we need to remember how frustrated people were after being 4-5 after Round 9.
So where to here for the Dockers? They have a rare opportunity in the next 3 weeks where they don’t have to leave Western Australia, playing North Melbourne, Essendon and St Kilda all at Optus Stadium.
You probably would have Fremantle starting favourites in all those matches, however footy has shown that you’re always going to drop out of form eventually, then pick it back up again. I expect the Dockers to drop one of those games (But won’t complain if we don’t)
It’s cliché but this team simply needs to take things a week at a time. If you look ahead in blocks, you’ll lose track of what’s in front of you, but there’s no doubt Freo’s focus right now is solely on North Melbourne.
As a Freo supporter i’d like to see us bring more experience into the side. It will likely be unpopular but someone will have to make way for Jaeger O’Meara in this side, I think he’s composed on the ball, and we do need on-field experience, history shows you can’t win a flag without it.
A big test is what happens with the Sean Darcy, Luke Jackson combination. It worked against the Suns, but will it work every week? Will Jackson play on ball or go back to the forward line? Will they both remain at the club?
I also want to call on the Freo fanbase. We need to not be reactionary, we need to know where we’re at. We’re 7-5, is that where we thought we’d be, maybe, maybe not.
But like our squad, we need to take it one week at a time. Bouncing from “burn the club down” to “book the bus” every few weeks is not gonna get us anywhere. It’ll be a good ride for the rest of the season, we’ll drop games we didn’t expect to, and win games we didn’t expect to. It’s all part of the journey.