After The Game With Snaps Truly - Rd 7 2025, V Adelaide Crows

Look if you don’t mind, I just want to get something off my chest.

Much as I respect the thoughtful solemnity associated with the ANZAC Day Round – I really don’t believe it should start with an ANZAC Day Eve clash and then finish with a soulless Sunday afternoon fixture three days later.

ANZAC Day is a day not a weekend.

Friday was ANZAC Day and during the afternoon the traditional Collingwood – Essendon game paid an appropriate homage. Later in the evening, Freo hosted Adelaide in another fine and respectful commemoration.

But that should be enough.

It seems the AFL has been allowed to appropriate a National Day of Reflection and turn it into some kind of marketing extravaganza across a long weekend, to honour a largely invented, albeit irresistible connection between young footballers and brave Diggers.

About whom we are now reminded so regularly, not to forget, that we may soon shout back “How could we?”.

And I nearly choked on my bully beef when I heard that great war historian Mick Malthouse suggest that apparently many young people today don’t even realise that New Zealanders were at Gallipoli too.

I reckon he made that up. Maybe they just haven’t heard of him.

George Orwell once said that “sport is frankly mimic warfare”, and what a relief it is that we still have the luxury of differentiating between the two. But please AFL, next year let us bow our heads and hear the Last Post played on Saturday April 25 and observe a minute of silence.

Let’s not have both on a loop until Monday.

And so, to Friday night …

And a confession. I wasn’t there. I missed the match because I went to a party at a caravan park in Denmark, with a group of South Fremantle types with their camp dogs, free range children, natural wine, and dangerously leftist views. To my disgust, I couldn’t find a single supporter of The Clive Palmer Arse Trumpet Party at the event and have great fears for the movement in next weekend’s election.

When I finally sat down to watch the match, I saw the response we fans had craved.

Freo were fierce from the opening bounce. A gang tackling, brawling, teeth bared assault on a nonplussed Adelaide side. Reminiscent of course of other brave boys and other far away battlefields … blah blah blah.

It was none of that. It was just footy.

The highlights?

The Treacy bomb from outside 50 to set the tone.

The Bolton sidestep and goal through traffic.

The reinvented Oscar MacDonald dashing into an open goal.

Hayden Young’s raking left foot. (I mention this every week, I know.)

The brilliant run-down chase from Jordy Clark on Neal-Bullen.

Amiss playing higher up the ground and finding more of the footy and distributing it well.

Freddy bending beautiful goals from the boundary.

And the match highlight, undoubtedly, as Dudley tapped to Reid and his bobbling, bending, bouncing banana skipped delightedly between the posts.

As if there was any doubt.

Freo went into the final quarter 41 points in front and eased up to win by 18. The huge crowd wanted more, but the game was already won after three quarters.

Andy Brayshaw won the inaugural Arthur Leggett medal for best afield with 37 disposals including 20 handballs. Mercifully his head wasn’t swathed in bandages as it usually is, and he looked less the wounded soldier than the delighted senior leader he is of a footy team.

A really good performance by Freo.

But let’s not call it heroic.

Not yet.

St Kilda in Melbourne on Friday.

And lest you forget, a Federal Election on Saturday.

Vote early and vote often.

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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