Fremantle produce season-best effort to snag rare road win
I swear, the Dockers exist solely to make an idiot out of me.
Anyone who has had the displeasure of reading any of my work for The Mongrel website will know I am an avid Walyalup fan, and while I will never jump ship, the past two weeks has had me wondering what it would be like to become an honorary Tasmanian…
Alas, in true Dockers form, just as the fans are ready to pack it in, they produce their best performance of the season so far and all but cruise to an 8.13 (61) to 13.17 (95) victory over the GWS Giants.
It was the club’s first win at Engie Stadium, and their first win on the road for 2025 (excluding Gather Round).
And now, the sick cycle of starry-eyed hope followed by inevitable disappointment renews again.
I should mention, this is a bit different from my usual match reports. As our man Justin Longmuir would say, I’m usually a bit more vanilla and a lot more detailed, but I had some family commitments to attend to yesterday, so I’ve opted to take a more big-picture view and focus on some of the main individual performances and coaching plotlines we saw yesterday.
Basically, rather than re-watching an entire game of footy to recount slight details (or worse yet, insult my readers by trying to tap into my slightly hungover memory), I thought we’d just dive straight into some key takeaways. Let’s go!
Shai Bolton, worth every penny
The best player on the ground and the most consistent across the four quarters, Walyalup’s superstar recruit ran rings around the Giants in this one.
Bolton finished the day with 24 disposals, 3 goals from six scoring attempts, 10 score involvements and a few clearances to boot.
It’s the sort of statline Fremantle fans haven’t seen since Michael Walters was running around in his prime, and it’s why the club paid the big price it did to pry him out of Richmond.
At the time, and even now still, plenty of fans will tell you the Dockers paid overs to procure the smooth mover’s services. Balderdash, I say!
The final trade essentially ended up as Richmond receiving draft picks that became Taj Hotton, Jonty Faull and Luke Trainor, while Fremantle received Bolton and the pick that would become Murphy Reid.
To me, this is a trade that benefited both parties, but if I’m Freo, I would do it over and over and over again.
Bolton has consistently been in Dockers’ best (don’t believe the “won’t show up next week” bullshit you’ll read in most comments sections) and he’s making an even bigger difference now that he’s replaced Hayden Young’s spot in the midfield.
He attended 12 centre bounces yesterday, and I would be tempted to give him even more if I was Justin Longmuir. Yes, it’s great to have him in the forward line as well, but I just want to see Bolton around the ball as much as possible.
He was outstanding in this one, and I fully expect to hear S Bolton, three votes on Brownlow night.
What happened to the GWS we saw in Geelong last week?
Ferocious, desperate, composed.
These are the three traits GWS showed in their stellar victory over Geelong just a week ago… so where the hell were they for this one?
Seriously, this looked like a shadow of the Giants side I have grown accustomed to fearing.
The numbers will tell you their prime movers and shakers had enough of the footy. Lachie Ash had 29 disposals, Lachie Whitfield and Tom Green 25 apiece, 24 for Finn Callaghan. Sounds great, right?
Well, it certainly didn’t look great. Credit to Fremantle for applying the pressure they’ve severely lacked in recent weeks, but I still couldn’t quite wrap my head around just how impotent the Giants looked in this game.
Rarely did they move the ball with any fluency, and too often did they give it straight back to the men in purple.
Coach Adam Kingsley lamented the turnovers in his halftime interview, asking his boys to simply “do it better” without changing much stylistically.
To his fury, they were even worse in the second half, going goalless in the third term as Fremantle pushed the margin to an unassailable point.
I’m not going to say it’s panic stations after this loss, but Kingsley will be mortified with this performance.
Freo mids beat the Bedford tag
I thought Andrew Brayshaw (and by extension, my fantasy team) was in for a rough day when Toby Bedford went to him at the first centre bounce.
Bedford has made a name for himself as a reliable and effective tagger, and I was somewhat surprised that he didn’t go to Caleb Serong from the jump.
I’m not sure Bedford was fully right in this game, but whatever the case, the tag failed and Fremantle’s midfield had a huge say on how this game shook out.
After a quiet first term in which it looked like the tag would indeed hinder his day, Brayshaw was able to detach from his clingy opponent and finish with 30 disposals, six tackles, three clearances and seven score involvements.
Serong made the most of the Giants’ decision not to tag him instead, piling up his own big statline with 36 disposals and eight clearances.
Together, and with the help of Bolton on the outside, the Docker duo overpowered a very capable GWS midfield and, dare I say, won the game for their side.
Luke Jackson is Fremantle’s number one ruckman
We might have already known, but this game all but decided that Luke Jackson simply has to be Fremantle’s number one ruck option moving forward.
I didn’t think his GWS opponent, Kieran Briggs, was disgraced in this one, but he was soundly beaten by the freakish Jackson who continually used his superior athleticism and dexterity at ground level to impact where Briggs could not.
Plenty is made of Jackson’s ability to follow up his own ruck work, farm out smooth handballs and win his own clearances, but perhaps not enough is made of his actual tap work.
It was on show in this one. He consistently fed Serong, Brayshaw and Bolton on a silver platter, setting them on their merry way without hesitation. He finished the day with 21 disposals, 32 hit outs and seven clearances.
The word is Sean Darcy will be fit to play next week, but it’s become clear that until he gets his body completely right, he will be holding the team back by not allowing Jackson the ruck minutes he deserves.
It also doesn’t help Darcy that Pat Voss was serviceable in his back-up ruck minutes.
However, this ruck conundrum could be presented to the big fella as an opportunity. Something along the lines of “hey mate, we don’t need to rush you back, so how about you put together a mini pre-season at Peel Thunder while Jackson and Voss take care of things?”
It would give Darcy time to get confident that his body is going to hold up, and build into some playing form.
Of course, once he’s ready to play, you’re back in the same conundrum again… but hey, it’ll kick the can down the road for a couple of months.
Lachie Ash is having some sort of season
Taken with pick four in the 2019 draft, Lachie Ash is living up to the hype, and was a bright spot in his side’s defeat yesterday.
Tallying 29 disposals and eight marks, the running defender has taken a leap this season and is matching (if not exceeding) the output of his superstar running mate Lachie Whitfield.
Fair enough, he faded in the second half, but so did the rest of his team. He was always pretty handy, but I’m enjoying watching this bloke progress to another level as a player.
Cooper Simpson is an important, albeit unsung, addition for Freo
A second-year player who has had to adapt to a new role at half back, Cooper Simpson has impressed mightily across the past two weeks.
Drafted as a dynamic and opportunistic forward with a light frame, he spent the early parts of the season trialling as a half back at Peel Thunder, and it’s a move that looks to be paying off.
His elite ball use is something the Dockers were severely lacking, and despite not tallying a huge amount of disposals, he’s certainly making the most of his time with the footy in hand.
He went at 85% efficiency from his 14 disposals in this one, and bagged his first goal.
Simpson consistently sets up scoring plays, and more importantly, he’s got the balls to pull the trigger on the inside passes that cut teams to ribbons when they work.
There will of course be games where these kicks don’t work, but you have to take the good with the bad in these sorts of high-risk, high-reward players, and I’m willing to live with that.
It’s also no coincidence that Jordan Clark has played his best footy since Simpson came into the team. They often set each other up, and just having Simpson around to provide some run and dash of his own helps take the pressure off Clark.
Some quick-hitters to finish off
- While quiet on the scoreboard, Josh Treacy played a selfless game, dragging Sam Taylor away from Fremantle’s attacking 50m arc.
- Both sides might need to work on their set shots this week.
- It wasn’t his biggest game, and he got hurt, but Finn Callaghan scares the daylights out of me when he gets it in space.
- Michael Frederick is a barometer for Freo, and his three goals deserved a more prominent mention than the one I am giving him at the bottom of this article.
- Beating GWS on the road after losing to the Saints by 10 goals is the most Dockery thing ever.
