After The Game With Snaps Truly - Rd 4 2025 V Western Bulldogs

“Quite embarrassed and ashamed.”

“Incredibly remorseful.”

Well, so they should be. The umpiring in this match was lamentable. Whenever a Western Bulldogs player was caught with the footy, he was personally thanked by the men in green for the care he showed it. When a Freo player grabbed the ball, it was as if he’d snatched a child off the street. The law came down like a tonne of bricks.
So, what’s with the quotes then? Did the umpires apologise?

I wish.

No, those words arrived earlier in the week from Eagles co-captain Oscar Allen. And ironically enough I didn’t think he had much to apologise for.

His only crime was to want to get the hell away from the hapless, hopeless Harley Reids and the club was embarrassed when we all found out about it. And so, they made him beg for fan forgiveness.

He should just be sorry he got caught.

Umpires? Well, they don’t apologise and should never have to. Although the AFL did offer something of a mea culpa on their behalf on Monday. They agreed an Izak Rankine mark, should have been paid in front of goal in the dying moments of the game with Gold Coast. The Crows lost the match by a point.

Adelaide have received quite a few of these apologies in recent times, and their fans know them to be worth absolutely nothing, so perhaps Freo fans shouldn’t feel too hard done by.

Because we still won.

We bloody well won.

An old detective once told me, that the eye witness account of a serious crime should not always be relied upon. How, he asked, could unsuspecting onlookers truly process a sudden split-second moment of chaos playing out in front of them?

This copper said he only came to trust CCTV cameras. He was only interested in what they actually saw.

And so, hours after the game finished, I watched the replay.

Stripped of the anger of a booing baying crowd around me and now relieved of the possibility of defeat, I saw some things differently. Sure, the free kick count ran 27-15 in favour of the visitors, but what seemed more apparent was that in almost every other 50-50 call – every line ball moment, Freo lost just about all of them. Every time we called heads; the coin came down tails.
We were not really being persecuted; we were just a bit unlucky.

And it’s easy to collect grievances when you’re a supporter of a largely unsuccessful sporting team. Every fan knows, everything has to go right for us to have any kind of chance at all. And we know all too well, how often it goes completely wrong.

Even when we are playing brilliantly, we never seem far enough in front. We never feel safe. We are always vulnerable to being run down by better teams and cruel fate.

And it nearly happened on Sunday. But it didn’t.
It didn’t. Freo held on to win by 16 points in a performance that was filled with character and sprinkled with the delicious talents of Shai Bolton. Be it leaping above packs, accelerating away from defenders, or kicking long loping goals, Bolton brings us pure quality.

And when was the last time, we saw Freo bang on six unanswered goals in about 12 minutes? A Freddy snap, a Dudley Do Right crumb, and quickfire conversions from Treacy, Banfield, Brayshaw and Sharp.

It was thrilling.

However close the Bullies seemed to get after that, they were always playing catch up.
And what about those final moments? Freo had lost the brilliant bullocking Jackson to a hamstring strain and O’Driscoll and Wagner had gone down too. No one left on the bench and Patrick Voss asked to take on Tim English in the ruck.

Oh no! Not Vossy? Not with everything on the line!
Patrick Voss, as you may have gathered, is becoming a bit of a favourite of mine. Every time he plays, he does something, or doesn’t do something – that makes me want to write about him. He celebrates other people’s goals as if he’d kicked them himself – which we know he seldom does. His love of his teammates is immense and unquestioning, a bit like a very excitable labrador. Tickle Pat behind the ear and he’ll follow you for all eternity and no doubt break quite a lot of the furniture on the way.

And yet when it mattered most, in the dying minutes of that last quarter, Pat the Adorable Labrador managed to shovel the ball through to Murphy Reid who calmly snagged the goal that sealed the win.

Freo head to the Barossa 2-2 with a likely win against Richmond next weekend.

Very well played.

And what of Reid? Well, I reckon he may yet prove just as important to the Dockers as the brilliant Bolton. Still only a kid, he comes to footy with a basketballer’s instincts. He’s not Scott Pendlebury yet, but he has an awareness; those instinctive footy smarts, that few others possess.

Oh, and one final message to the umpires. You know when you called Murph for a deliberate out of bonds in the last quarter and I booed you and got quite red in the face?

Well, I watched the replay and you were right. He did push it over the line.

Sorry.

Just this once.

Play on.

Yours truly,

Snaps Truly

By our multi-talented and amazingly insightful footy scribe, SNAPS TRULY. Snaps has seen and done it all. He may or may not have been a fringe player at Fremantle. Don’t miss Snaps’ report after each Freo Dockers match here on the Shipping News throughout the 2025 season.

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