“Flagmantle” is no joke now. There are some outstanding teams who haven’t really got warm yet. But the Dockers are the ones with the best and the most even spread of talent. The Dockers are the ones who have met every challenge, who can win in a dozen different ways, and who have reeled off one of the more impressive three-month streaks of recent years. The Dockers are the ones with the whiff of history about them.
A trip to the Gabba is no picnic and there was a view that the visitors could be got at on the weekend. Bookmakers, bless their benevolent souls, installed Brisbane as favourites. Fremantle had been up for a long time, were flying to the opposite point of the country, were missing several of their most important players and were up against a proud, still smarting opponent.
And indeed, the Lions threw a lot at them. They tried control, and then they tried chaos. They tried their short, angle-shifting kicking game. They tried bombing it long, which was a total bust. They tried ramping up their clearance and contested game.But Fremantle had answers for all of it. They totally outclassed them. The final margin probably didn’t do justice to how much they controlled the game.
This Lions side has been on a steady upward trajectory for nearly a decade now, and it’s only natural that they’re in a rut. Several of their champions are labouring and they’re desperately missing some vital role players and lockdown defenders. Brisbane’s next month includes a Queensland derby, a date with Sydney and a trip to the Kardinia Park. They’ve always been at their best when they’ve felt the blade against the skin. But Geelong, GWS and now Fremantle have all twisted the knife in recent weeks.
The Dockers are a hard-working, well-structured team that use propulsive handball to great effect, flick the footy to the outside and then turn it into a running race. Few teams get more value from their bottom half a dozen players, which is not praise that’s been heaped upon them in recent years. They do the common things uncommonly well. But they are still a side with sizzle, and still a side that can slam on a lot of goals in a 10-minute period.
When they’re in that mode, their three tall forwards are unstoppable. Josh Treacy, Patrick Voss and Jye Amiss all have very different footballing pedigrees, temperaments and skillsets. Treacy has hands like a champion gully fieldsman, Voss often strays into pantomime territory and Amiss projects a rather bewildered air at times. But they complement one another perfectly. They’ve now combined for 78.54 so far this season. All three are a threat when the ball hits the ground, all three apply a stack of pressure, all three are in sync with the fleet of smaller forwards buzzing at their feet.
Of course, being this good at the halfway point of the season can be perilous. Collingwood in 2025 and Sydney in 2024 were playing scintillating football but were gradually dragged back to the pack through winter. Only five premiers in the past quarter of a century were top of the table after round 12. Fremantle themselves were ladder leaders at this point of the season in 2015. But the 2026 version has a lot in their favour. Their draw opens up now. They won’t leave Western Australia until early July. And their remaining away trips are mostly against teams in the bottom third of the ladder.
I’ll close with a quick word on how they’ve constructed their list. Fremantle don’t have a single father-son, academy selection or free agent. They have nailed their high, mid-range and speculative picks. Rookie draft selections are the rescue dogs of the footy world and they have unearthed some gems in there – Treacy and Karl Worner in particular. And they have excelled at identifying and nurturing discarded players from other clubs.
“Supporting Freo seems to me to represent simple and honourable values,” the journalist Matt Price wrote many years ago. “Humour, for a start. Loyalty. Persistence and struggle. Patience and tolerance. An antidote to the incurable virus of instant gratification.”
Price died four years later of a brain tumour. He was 46. The Dockers he knew and loved really were a bunch of bumblers. He never saw the Ross Lyon version, and I doubt he would have warmed to them in the same way. But he would have loved this team. He would have loved Wharfie Time, the structural miracle of Alex Pearce’s hair, the plasticity of Isaiah Dudley and the cartoon villainy of Voss. The 2026 Dockers really do combine the best of Lyon’s grim, attritional sides and the wild west days of Clive Waterhouse and Tony Modra – a team to love, to fear and to trust.
