Not A Dress Rehearsal, Honest!

Justin Longmuir spent the week insisting this is just another game. The entire football media spent the week discussing Fremantle’s grand final preparations.

Fremantle 1st on the ladder, 18-2. A club-record eighteenth win banked. Top two locked, two home finals locked, premiership favourites, and 7-2 on the road this year. The only remaining question is what else there is left to prove before September.

Melbourne, 6th at 13-7. Hunting a top-four spot, four points clear of the Wildcard round, and 9-1 at the MCG this season. A surprisingly good side about to run into a classy operation and get a reminder that just because you change your coach doesn’t mean you get to play with the big boys.

First, the housekeeping for those of us on real time: the ball goes up at 1:15pm over east, which is 11:15am in Perth. Breakfast footy. Set the alarm, put the bacon on, and be seated by the first bounce, because this one deserves your full pre-midday attention. It’s also the Pink Lady Match, Melbourne’s annual game supporting breast cancer awareness, and whatever colours you wear, that’s a cause worth getting behind.

Now, the football media has spent seven days pointing out that if things go to plan, this is Fremantle’s final Saturday afternoon at the MCG before a certain Saturday afternoon at the MCG in late September. The last chance to feel the ground, read the breeze, bank the rhythms of the place. A dress rehearsal, in other words. Justin Longmuir, presented with this theory, flatly rejected it: the club is not treating this as a Grand Final rehearsal, banking MCG experience is no longer important for this group, it shouldn’t hold any fears for us, we just need to stay in the moment. All very sensible. All very disciplined. All exactly what a coach is contractually obliged to say in the second week of August.

We, however, are not coaches, and we are bound by no such oath. So let us say what JL cannot: of course it’s a dress rehearsal. It’s a 1:15pm Saturday bounce at the MCG against quality opposition in front of a big crowd with something riding on it. If you designed a September simulation in a laboratory you could not improve on it. The players will say all the right things about staying present, and then they will walk out of that race, look up at those towering stands, and every single one of them will allow themselves precisely one thought: see you in seven weeks.

The opposition, to their credit, is real. Melbourne under Steven King have been the competition’s quiet achievers, nine wins from ten at this ground, averaging over 108 points a game across the past five rounds, with Harrison Petty and Jacob van Rooyen forming a properly dangerous forward pairing and Max Gawn still ruling ruck contests like a man collecting rent. They ground out a nine-point win over Gold Coast last week to keep their top-four push alive, and they know a scalp like ours would announce them as genuine September players rather than tourists. They also own the most recent MCG meeting between these clubs, a ten-point win in autumn last year that Demons fans have clung to like a family heirloom. We should note, it is the only time they’ve beaten us in the last five attempts.

Because the rest of that ledger reads rather differently: 48 points in Round 2 this year, when we put 118 on them at Optus. Fifty points in 2024. Seven points at the MCG in 2023. And the 92-point evisceration in Alice Springs in 2024 that presumably still wakes Max Gawn at 3am. Fremantle have owned this matchup: Andrew Brayshaw is averaging 38 disposals across his past three games against Melbourne, and Hayden Young has topped 25 touches in each of his past five against them. Some teams simply suit you. The Demons, bless them, suit us like a tailored purple blazer.

Then there is the story within the story: Luke Jackson versus Max Gawn, the apprentice against the master, the kid who won a premiership in red and blue at twenty before coming home to build something of his own. Longmuir put it simply this week: Luke loves going up against the best, loves trying to prove himself. Gawn was colossal last week with 25 touches, 33 hitouts, ten marks, nine clearances and according to the Vic based pundits, remains the benchmark. But Jackson is coming for the All-Australian blazer and there is no stage he’d rather take it on than this one, against this opponent. (Sean Darcy, meanwhile, put up 41 hitouts and 26 possessions at Peel and still couldn’t crack the 23.)

Team news is mercifully brief, as it has been all season: Brennan Cox returns for the trip, the skipper gets to rest his battered and bruised body, the rest of the 23 rolls on untouched, and the Dockers’ injury list continues to read like a blank page. Melbourne are largely unchanged too, with a couple of their walking wounded still a week or two away. The weather is the only wildcard, a blustery Melbourne winter afternoon, fifteen degrees, northerly winds swirling up to 40 clicks with showers threatening late. The famous MCG swirl will be on. Handy thing to practise reading, that. You know, for no particular reason.

So here’s the shape of it. Melbourne will come hard early, because they always do at home, but this Fremantle side has won eighteen games for a reason, and the reason is that it does not blink. We were goalless at half time against Sydney and won by 38. We trailed Port at the main break and won by 28. The second halves keep arriving like a tide. And somewhere around the 20-minute mark of the third quarter, on the ground where it matters most, in the timeslot that matters most, this team will do the thing it has done all season and 60,000 people will get a little preview of their own.

THE VERDICT

The Dees bring their MCG record, their top-four dreams and their aging talismanic ruck. We bring the best team in the competition to its favourite future venue. Rehearsal goes well. Standing ovation. Encore in seven weeks.

FREMANTLE BY 40