How the Fremantle Dockers have always been a club that does things differently as they come up against the Brisbane Lions at the MCG on Saturday
When the first siren sounds at the MCG on Saturday, Gerard Neesham will be in either the sandy savannah of the Kalahari Desert or a lodge in Maun, a village in Botswana that is the gateway for tourists on safari to the Okavango Delta.
His exact location will depend on what his friend – former Western Bulldogs cult hero Danny Southern, whom Neesham considers as a “guru” on Africa – can tell him about the internet connection on the fringes of the Kalahari.
“We’ll be watching,” Neesham told this masthead from his lodging in Maun during a rare moment with internet connection on his vacation. “If I can’t watch it somewhere else, I’ll stay where I am. I’m going to watch it and hope like hell we win.”
That Neesham is in Africa – with his wife, Heather, on a holiday planned a year in advance – observing lions, elephants and hippos during Fremantle’s charge to what their faithful hope will be a landmark first flag is fitting for a club with as quirky a history as the Dockers’.
A club with deep working-class roots forced to do it the hard way by the league, Fremantle have always done things differently. No other club has purple as their colour. They were the first to wear green on their jumper, and broke convention by not having an animal as their moniker. Oh, and their song, is widely derided by opposition fans but loved by the Dockers faithful.
“It was a bit out there, wasn’t it?” club great and foundation Docker Shaun McManus said.
The Dockers broke the mould because they were told to by the AFL. They also wanted to.
Named after the port city, Fremantle embraced the town’s blue-collar heritage. Their nickname is a nod to Fremantle’s maritime history.
There was initial opposition to the choice. Many had thought Fremantle would be known as the Sharks, a red herring perpetuated by WA football great and former South Fremantle coach Mal Brown. The Mariners, Dolphins and Doctors were also bandied about.
Keen to keep their real name under wraps, the club did little to set the record straight. They also wanted to avoid bad press through any association with the notorious Painters and Dockers union.
“We did help things along a bit by encouraging people to think the Sharks, through Malcolm Brown,” the Dockers’ first chief executive David Hatt told this masthead this week. “We kept Dockers pretty low in the priorities because you may remember that there was a serious problem with a union.
“There were some people who were trenchantly against Dockers because they thought it gave the wrong image, but we didn’t.”
Though purple and white are the Dockers’ official colours, there will be more than a smattering of red and green in the crowd at the MCG. The colours acknowledge the signalling flags of dockers guiding ships into harbour.
The idea of the song, derived from a traditional Russian folk song, was to illustrate hard-working people pulling together, Hatt said, and the “heave-ho” reference an acknowledgment of the rally cry to inspire rowers to paddle harder.
Music, though, was low down the list of priorities for the fledgling Dockers, who were given what Hatt describes as “clearly the worst player rules to any new franchise – before, then or after”.
West Coast, the establishment club in Perth, were an on-field powerhouse in the early 1990s when the Dockers were founded. From their pre-draft selections, the Eagles secured future stars including Don Pyke, Peter Sumich, Glen Jakovich, Mitchell White and Jason Ball – all of whom became premiership players.
Fearful of the creation of another WA juggernaut, the other 15 clubs gave the Dockers very little. In the 1994 draft, they had picks one and four and the first two picks in each round. As a comparison, next year Tasmania have picks one, three, five, seven, nine, 11 and 13.
While the cornerstone of the Dockers’ list came from the four aligned WAFL clubs to which they had unlimited access, they could also sign a maximum of 12 uncontracted players over two years from other AFL clubs.
This did not work out as hoped. Future hall-of-fame inductee Andrew McLeod was traded to Adelaide for Chris Groom, who played seven games. By recruiting Todd Ridley, Tony Delaney and Dale Kickett from Essendon, the Bombers gained access to goalkicking greats Matthew Lloyd and Scott Lucas in 1994.
They were also unable to lure the elite over the Nullarbor, the exception being their first captain Ben Allan, who was Hawthorn’s best and fairest in their 1991 premiership year.
“Ian Collins, the former football manager of the AFL, informed us that we were given player rules which guaranteed us to win either zero or one game in our first year,” Hatt said.
Ross Oakley, the AFL’s chief at the time of the club’s inception, said the Dockers were not set up to fail but “we always thought we should’ve given them more”.
“If you bring a new team into the competition, you want to make them successful,” Oakley said.
“It’s a case of how successful. What we didn’t want to do was make them so strong that they would damage the competition for other clubs that might have been struggling.”
The Dockers comfortably exceeded expectations, due in considerable part to Neesham’s enterprising coaching. Neesham, who adopted methods from his career as a water polo international, was ahead of his time.
In an era when teams kicked the ball long and direct, Neesham adopted a fast, counterattacking style. Defenders were encouraged to mark more, rather than spoil. Playing a “chip-and-draw” game, as it was mockingly known in the media, Neesham wanted his men to run and carry the ball.
“I didn’t use that term at all,” Neesham said. “What we did was try and create an advantage. The optimal advantage in sport is one on none, on your own with the pill – whether it’s basketball, water polo or soccer.”
Though the Dockers did not play finals during Neesham’s four seasons at the helm, their first generation of players have become celebrated online, like cult figures Clive Waterhouse and Matthew “Spider” Burton.
One of their favourite sons, McManus, will present the cup to coach Justin Longmuir and skipper Alex Pearce should the Dockers salute. McManus, who played in just four finals in his 228-game AFL career, said he would celebrate as if he were in the 23.
“It means a lot to all past players,” McManus said. “It means a lot to me to be a part of it and to be out there. I’ll be celebrating massively that night, and I’d imagine for the club [it would] be a bit of a relief too – the fact that they’ve been able to climb the mountain and finally get there.”
For Neesham, the joy of winning will override not being there in person.
“I’m born in Fremantle, grew up in Fremantle, schooled in Fremantle, so I’ll be dying a Fremantle supporter,” Neesham said.
“If me being in Botswana happens to coincide with us winning, I’ll live in Botswana. If that means we’ll win every year, I’ll stay here.”
Keep up to date with the best AFL coverage in the country. Sign up for the Real Footy newsletter.
