If any moment could serve as a microcosm of Nat Fyfe’s spellbinding first half of the season for Fremantle it must be the miraculous, hypnotically bending goal he potted from the Domain Stadium boundary against Richmond in round 10.
The skilfulness of the kick itself was one thing – Fyfe hemmed in on the boundary with a sliver of goal face to aim at and a ‘banana’ his only option – but it was the moments prior that made it one of the cleverest, most instinctive goals of this or any season. He’d stalked his opponent out towards the boundary as the contest demanded but half-way there retreated subtly, simultaneously anticipating where Taylor Hunt’s outlet handball would land and backing off that target, Troy Chaplin, just enough for the contact of Fyfe’s firm shove to come as a surprise to the Tigers defender.
Was it a push in the back? Only Richmond fans could have cared once Fyfe gathered the ball inches inside the boundary, took a quick step back inside the line and stroked a dead-eyed, millimetre-perfect goal from an acute angle. Here was the premier midfielder of the competition combining the endlessly-honed foot skills of Eddie Betts with the un-teachable, urchin street-smarts of Hayden Ballantyne. Poetry and murder within him equally, as Robertson-Glasgow might have put it.
He’s had so many of those moments already in 2015. Can many other top-tier midfielders use opponents like stepladders as Fyfe did over Anthony Miles in that same game? Fremantle lost that night and Fyfe had an off night in relative terms (20 contested possessions and nine clearances currently being his warped version of a dirty day) but he still seemed hell bent on producing both the mark and goal of the year.
Even better than the Miles mark was the screamer Fyfe took over Sydney’s Luke Parker, which benefits from multiple viewings of the reverse angle to fully appreciate the way he was able to contort his body mid-air, counter intuitively wrapping his left leg around the front of his opponent and using his own momentum to swivel into position for the mark.
Most players would have launched a split second later from the left foot and led with the right knee. Had wily Swan Jarrad McVeigh lacked the foresight to hover behind the contest at ground level, Fyfe would have landed cleanly on both feet and facing Fremantle’s goal, so probably would have sped straight off into attack. An Olympic figure skater couldn’t have choreographed the precise coordination of limbs better. It was a moment of spontaneous genius.
It’s been a “changing of the guard” year in a number of respects this 2015 season. Hawthorn, Sydney and Fremantle might again loom as the most serious premiership aspirants but much else remains unclear. Port Adelaide is no longer the thundering, irresistible force it was a season ago, Geelong’s golden era now seems eons ago, Chris Judd and Mick Malthouse are both gone from the game altogether and a number of sides – West Coast, Collingwood, GWS and the Bulldogs primarily – have come from near enough to nowhere.
So too change has been wrought in the pecking order of elite individual talent, where Fyfe now sits so far above the nearest Brownlow Medal fancies that bookmakers decided as early as round eight to pay out on bets for him. Decent judges have Fyfe best on ground in eight of 11 matches so far. Gary Ablett Jr hasn’t fallen off the face of the earth of course, he’s just sidelined by injury and also, one suspects, encumbered with a fate suffered by only the very best; a complacency to the blinding brilliance he’s produced for the best part of the last decade and the expectation that he shouldn’t ever dip far below it. The other minor miracle of Fyfe’s season is that he’s so capably assumed the leading role.
The only man consistently capable of running with Fyfe and Ablett in that outlier percentile is Pies skipper Scott Pendlebury, who also rarely drops off from his metronomic output nor wavers in the impossibly high standards he sets himself. He’s another for whom we’ve probably just run out of fresh ways to express our wonder.
Fyfe is on a different level this year though, somehow improving significantly from a season ago, when a pair of two-week suspensions put paid to a near-certain Brownlow win. That situation was instructive in itself. For all the skill and grace he shares with Pendlebury and Ablett, Fyfe’s probably a more imposing physical presence around the contest. Fremantle’s website currently lists him at 85kg, which might be cause for wry smiles from any players who’ve met him at the foot of packs or had the Dockers star crash over the top of their heads for a spectacular mark.
His tackle counts aren’t anything imposing for a Ross Lyon pupil but Fyfe often asserts himself with the keen physicality of a tagger so suspensions like last year’s always remain a possibility. In all of his six seasons in league football he’s conceded significantly more free kicks than he’s been awarded. “A regular country guy” is how Fyfe describes himself and in his attack on the ball carrier he’s often agricultural, impressively so.
You can only speculate as to whether sliding to pick 20 in the 2009 Draft relieved Fyfe of the pressures sometimes encountered by top five selections but the striving ethic of the family cattle transport business is perhaps the more pertinent environmental factor to consider. There can’t be many current players of Fyfe’s ilk given to considered takes on the meditative world of long-haul trucking or being quoted on live export trade in Farm Weekly.
The Fyfe physique is certainly no longer that of the lanky country boy who first bounced his way onto league grounds in 2010 with those long, skinny legs that made his boots look like clown shoes. Now he’s more like a cyborg or a prototype of some unimagined future; arms thicker than the thighs that powered some midfielders of eras gone by; legs the proportions of a mountain-climbing cyclist and equally useful for bursts of explosive speed as they are to have him gliding serenely from end to end.
Endurance and warp speed don’t hurt but at 190cm, Fyfe can also beat almost any match-up overhead as well. When he does take a rest from midfield duties and head forward he’s a desperately tough match-up, as Gold Coast found out a fortnight back when in the space of a minute Fyfe out-positioned Clay Cameron and then tossed aside Adam Saad for two quick goals, both of his makeshift opponents hopelessly ill-equipped to deal with the disparity in strength, class and poise.
In a separate contest on the wing Fyfe made Cameron look like a schoolboy, bullying his opponent away from the ball with an almighty shove and then powering towards goal from a standing start. A less resilient player than Fyfe would have earlier conceded that the ball was more likely to be ushered out of bounds.
You’d doubt that any coach for the rest of the season will be as winningly romantic as Adelaide’s Phil Walsh when he engineered that epic one-on-one showdown between Fyfe and Patrick Dangerfield in round nine, but what a gift all three men gave the game that night. Dangerfield has the ability to make supreme athletes look like slack-footed bystanders but even in producing one of the best individual performances of his career he merely matched Fyfe’s transcendent level for a single game.
All night they ran off each other, grappled, tackled and out-marked each other. Both kicked team-lifting goals while the game was in the balance. The singular and most audacious talent in their respective sides, they reloaded in synchronicity before every stoppage, holding the other’s arm with one hand and directing team-mates with the other. At one point Fyfe spotted a tackler descending on the Crow so left him to it, getting into position to receive the compromised handball before scurrying away along the boundary like a bag thief.
With his lung-busting runs, swooping handballs and booming drop punts, Dangerfield gained 582 metres for his side that night. No mean feat. Fyfe went for 958, a performance that you can only really wrap your head around if you tuck a Sherrin under your arm and sprint around the block for five minutes. The pair probably finished each other’s congratulatory sentences as the siren sounded.
“Call me a weirdo,” said Walsh after playing his directorial role in that absorbing duel, “but I think we have to protect the look of the game.” Amid all the corporate gibberish and cod-philosophy that modern footy generates, it’d do well to foster a few more weirdos like Walsh. Ball players like Fyfe fill the hearts of fans with unbridled joy. It’s heartening that someone of influence feels the same because that magic is produced against the backdrop of modern football’s overwhelmingly negative, cynical and unyielding strategies.
Of course this Brownlow Medal of Fyfe’s is never assured anyway, but the honour that should really drive him through the second half of this stupefying season is the ultimate prize: Fremantle’s breakthrough premiership. We now survey the trail of stiff-armed opponents Fyfe leaves in his wake, the split-open packs, dizzying marks and boundary-hugging goals but he and the rest of Ross Lyon’s squad has to seize upon the moment before it escapes them.
The rest of us need only get close to a TV screen when Fremantle is playing because watching in real time as Fyfe rises to this level of sustained, perspective-bending brilliance is the kind of opportunity that one shouldn’t squander. In other words, not such a regular country guy.
