After The Game With Snaps Truly - Rd 6 2025 V Melbourne Demons

G’day Dear Reader,

Sorry for the delay.

I’m usually very deadline driven. In the highly competitive world of football analysis as war reporting, I always want my copy filed promptly.

But, because we were playing Melbourne, well frankly I couldn’t really be fagged and I thought it a mere colour story.

After all, the Demons had proven themselves to be a hapless, hopeless, half-hearted mob of football easy beats. They were staring down a zero and six start to the season and had dropped the only blokes who I remember ever kicked any goals.

A Freo win was assured and beautiful easy prose would surely flow as elegantly as Shai Bolton into the forward fifty. And for those who like a story with a hint of danger, big Josh Treacy would no doubt late in the game pick up the irritating Jack Viney by his ears and force feed him to Max Gawn.

Just.

For.

Fun.

The match report would write itself.

And yet, today I sit here, disappointed with my lazy assumptions and unwillingness to do the hard work.

But evidently, I am not alone.

In the aftermath of a really poor Fremantle performance – you know the ones, where we have every reason to expect victory but just as reliably lose – Hayden Young today admitted that perhaps Freo had taken Melbourne a bit lightly. That the boys might have been a bit too comfortable going into the game.

Well bugger me.

WHAT, DEAR HAYDEN – WOULD HAVE GIVEN YOU AND YOUR TEAMMATES ANY REASON TO BELIEVE – GIVEN FREO’S LONG HISTORY OF FAILING WHEN IT MATTERS MOST – THAT THIS MIGHT BE A GAME TO TAKE FOR GRANTED?

And look, I appreciate reading a whole sentence of capital letters can be disconcerting and could suggest this reporter has become slightly drunk or deranged, but WHAT THE ACTUAL …?

Dear Hayden,

I’m calmer now.

Is there any evidence at all, that this is a Fremantle side that can afford to assume the arrival of any victory, just six games in?

Has our recent football been so audaciously brilliant, that we don’t need to lay a tackle, or put our head over the ball?

Hayden – I think you’re brilliant by the way – but we are a football club that no one takes very seriously. We are, until something changes, considered pretenders.

Laughed at sometimes, but mostly ignored.

And more than 50 thousand members and hundreds of thousands of fans really hate that.

And statements like yours.

At least Jordy Clark owned up to what was a disastrous failure.

“We were,” he said frankly, “shithouse.”

And what of Justin Perpetually Gobsmacked Longmuir? Was he aware of the potential for hubris?

That a complacent attitude might come back to haunt his team?

As it has done …

So.

Many.

Times.

Before?

I don’t want to keep writing “Poor Justin” but he is increasingly looking like the relief teacher who knows he only has the class until Friday, so there’s not much he can do about anything except bite his fingernails and await the bell (or siren.)

I don’t like to criticise players. They do try hard and they put themselves in harm’s way every week for our enjoyment. But today I am thinking less of them than the Fremantle fans.
The loyal ones. The fed-up ones. The flighty ones who may not stay.

Their faith on this Easter weekend, sorely tested again by a team, that by its own admission, didn’t really try hard enough and for whom resurrection seems most unlikely.

Yours truly,

SNAPS ALL IN CAPITALS AGAIN 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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