The Dockers’ plans to move south to a proposed $113 million training HQ at Cockburn Central saw an angry tide of purple turn against the club’s hierarchy.
But what many die-hard fans scrambling to get to the MCG for the club’s historic grand final don’t realise is Freo almost never made it to the port city in the first place.
Before a player even kicked a ball an old-fashioned melee erupted between Fremantle council and local heritage buffs about where the club should house its HQ.
The Fremantle Society didn’t want the clubrooms built between the turnstiles and the Moreton Bay fig on Parry Street, saying it would damage oval heritage and sightlines to the prison.
Tired of being tangled in heritage-tape the club contemplated headquartering itself at East Fremantle Oval and even toyed with the idea—shudder—of Joondalup in the far northern suburbs.
The council did end up approving an HQ at Parry Street but it never got off the ground and, in the end, it was decided to extend the WAFL’s South Fremantle clubrooms to accommodate the new AFL team.
Then, Fremantle council gave the club a $950,000 self-supporting loan over 21 years—the biggest ever granted by the council at the time. Fast-forward 18 years and it was a relative pittance compared to the $100 million the council was prepared to spend to convince the club not to move to Cockburn.
Ralph Hoare, head of the Fremantle Society when the Dockers first arrived in town, says the 12-month battle to save the oval’s heritage often turned nasty.
“It was bitter at times,” he recalls. “Basically the council were like ‘this is our oval so let’s get the Dockers’. It’s not too dissimilar to what’s happening now with the Dockers.
People
“Cockburn is trying to get the Dockers but the people of Fremantle feel it is their team and town.
“The people of Fremantle feel you can’t take our name and expand it out to Cockburn.
“But we’ll have to wait and see whether Mr Abbott gives them the money to move out to the sticks.”
Mr Hoare believes the Dockers would have stuck by Freo in 1994 even if they’d not got their way, but the council flinched.
“There was a a lot of furphies going on and a lot of frustrations, but no, the Dockers weren’t going anywhere else.”
A long-time Dockers’ fan, Mr Hoare flew out to Melbourne Wednesday morning for the grand final: “I don’t want to be blunt, but they will win,” he says. “It’s fantastic for for the club and fantastic for Fremantle.”
There’s little doubt the club has underperformed over its 19 years, achieving just five finals campaigns. It took home the wooden spoon in 2001.
Port Adelaide—admittedly a powerhouse in the SAFL—joined the competition in 1997, won a premiership in 2004 and played a second grand final in 2007.
And while last week inaugural coach Gerard Neesham said the AFL hierarchy didn’t help the club in the early days with draft concessions, the Dockers made some monumental stuff-ups trading players.
One that got away
Every club has their “one that got away story” and Fremantle let a skinny kid called Andrew McLeod go home to Adelaide. In return it got Chris Groom, who played seven games for the Dockers while McLeod won two Norm Smith medals in back-to-back flags with the Crows.
And while Neesham tried to beef up his player stocks with experienced players the club sacrificed pick 4 (Scott Lucas to Essendon) and pick 15 (Scott Camporeale to Carlton) for Scott Watters (26 games for the Dockers) from Sydney and Tony Delaney from Essendon, who played 28 games for Freo.
Things have improved: In recent years it has picked up Chris Mayne, Zac Clarke, Hayden Ballantyne, Nic Suban, Stephen Hill, Michael Walters, Michael Barlow, Nathan Fyfe and Tendai Mzunga, who will all run out onto the ground this Saturday.
The club may now have the best coach in the business in Ross Lyon, but the Dockers burned through five others first: Damian Drum replaced Neesham in 1999, lasting till round 10 in 2001 (Drum, now a Nationals MP in Victoria, led the club to 15th and 12th in his two seasons and oversaw the club’s worst losing streak of 17 games in 2001).
Inaugural captain Ben Allan took the reins to the end of the season, replaced by Chris Connolly who took the club to a preliminary final in 2006. After 129 games he’d had enough and quit in round 16, 2007, with Freo 13th. Connolly was replaced by Mark Harvey who was surgically, spectacularly and ruthlessly given the boot in September 2011.
Upon his arrival Harvey cleaned out the player list and was responsible for bringing in a host of young players like Hill and Walters.
In 2009 the club finished 14th but was back in the finals in 2010, winning an elimination final against the Hawks, before getting thumped by the Cats in the semi-final.
In 2011 the club was struck down by injuries which saw it finish a disappointing 10th. The poor year and inability to make consistent gains sealed Harvey’s fate.
His removal, and particularly the manner of it, divided the Fremantle fan base but it served to illustrate a break with the past (as did the new livery, ditching the much-derided green, white and purple uniform with the beanie-wearing Docker). Fremantle was tired of being almost good enough. No more Mr Nice Guy: Shit was about to get serious.
Fremantle’s snaring of Ross Lyon—unhappy with the way St Kilda was treating him, with a year to go on his contract—surprised everyone.
Within two short years Lyon has transformed the club into a powerhouse, moulding a talented but undiscplined and unfocused group of players into a team that is the talk of the competition.
Four years ago the Dockers kicked just one goal against Adelaide in a 117-point shellacking that confirmed its status as the laughing stock of the competition.
No-one’s laughing now.
What’s your superstition?
“IT’S only weird if it doesn’t work.”
Such is the slogan behind a popular American beer commercial, featuring sports fans and their favourite superstitions when watching their team.
The success of the Fremantle Dockers last weekend and their subsequent trip to the grand final can mean only one thing: Docker fans are getting superstitious.
Whether it’s not washing clothes after a win or leaving the room after each quarter, the methods fans will undertake to help the team win can span from eccentric to neurotic.
“I have a mild superstition, and that is I never like watching the first ten minutes of the last quarter,” says George Kailis.
“I basically get too nervous the Dockers might, um, do something wrong if they are in front.
“I usually like to go and do something else if they are in front at the fourth quarter. If they’re losing, I keep on watching.”
It seems the most popular forms of behaviour for Dockers’ fans rely on lucky actions and habits rather than lucky objects. While behaviours are not always rational, to true fans of the game, they are necessary for success.
Fremantle resident Tracy Turner: “I walk up and down and up and down, and when they take a goal, I turn around because I think they’ll score if I don’t look!”
Resident Greg Sweetman wears a full-body “morph suit” of the Australian flag every time he watches the Dockers play.
“Every game I’ve watched wearing this, they’ve won,” he says.
“I’ve been in this country for two months, and both times I’ve worn this and watched the Dockers play, they’ve blown out their opponent.”
“Don’t worry Fremantle faithful, I will be wearing it on Saturday.”
by BROOKE KOVANDA