From shockers to rockers: the rise of Fremantle from AFL joke to premiership contender

THERE used to be a running joke in football circles: what do you call 22 men watching the AFL finals on TV? The Fremantle Dockers.

Trent Croad

THERE used to be a running joke in football circles: what do you call 22 men watching the AFL finals on TV? The Fremantle Dockers.

A decade ago Fremantle was the only AFL team never to have featured in September, a team that rarely won in Victoria (nine times in its first seven seasons). A club gaining a reputation for packing off players such as Andrew McLeod, Peter Bell and James Clement to AFL rivals, where they transformed into gun footballers, respected leaders and trophy winners.

As coach Ross Lyon put it last week: “It was a fledgling club that was really the baby no one wanted.''

Having paid a $4 million fee to become the AFL's 16th club in 1995, Fremantle was granted a cluster of early draft picks and access to as many as 12 uncontracted AFL players. But the Dockers struggled in their formative years, never rising higher than 12th on the ladder during their first eight seasons.

''They were given little to set up and little resource,'' Lyon said. ''And through the backbone of Fremantle people and industry a club was built … so they’ve done it the hard way.

''I didn’t see two years of first-round draft picks given to them. The licence fee was nice but they’ve had to build a club from scratch and limited resources and it’s been a long hard battle.

''And at times they’ve been the laughing stock of the competition … but I think we do stand for a bit (now).''

So how did it happen?

How has Fremantle morphed from absolute Shockers to genuine contenders?

There have been three vital stepping stones over the decade leading into this season.
 

Trent Croad

2002

The Dockers had just come off a season in which they lost the opening 17 matches, collecting the 2001 wooden spoon with just two wins.

Worse still, the club had accumulated debts of $8 million and its membership and crowd figures were poor. A confidential report written by AFL football operations manager Andrew Demetriou described the Dockers' board as "dysfunctional" and its chairman Ross McLean as "tired and distracted".

Entering 2002 the club had new faces in every leadership role: Chris Connolly was appointed coach; dual Kangaroos premiership player Peter Bell returned as captain; businessman Rick Hart took on the presidency; and Cameron Schwab was appointed chief execuitve officer.

Schwab said the Fremantle founders had done a mighty job starting up from scratch, but by 2002 "there were genuine fears for the club. It only existed from 2001 because the owners funded it for the next little period."

The entire club opted for a fresh strategy.

"We had this plan called Every Quarter Of Every Match, which was about how we were going to grow the club," Schwab recalled. "And the idea was to just make sure that every little thing we did, we did as thoroughly as possible.

"'And that plan got ridiculed a little bit at the time because it was a little bit ambitious."

The first bold step was to be aggressive at the trade table. The Dockers picked up Luke McPharlin, Trent Croad, Jeff Farmer and Troy Simmonds, but those acquisitions came at the expense of draft picks 1 (Luke Hodge), 17 (James Kelly) and 36 (Sam Mitchell).

In an effort to boost crowd numbers the Dockers made a conscious decision to try to win as many home games as possible, even if it meant players skipping the odd away game. All nine of the Dockers' wins that season came at Subiaco.

Chris Connolly

Connolly was highly conscious of promoting the Dockers, not just coaching them.

The club, meanwhile, sought to make more of its heritage -- for example, lobbying for local legends such as Geroge Doig, John Todd and Steve Marsh to be inducted in the Australian football hall of fame -- while simultaneously capitalising on the points of difference that came with being a young club.

"'We really started to push the purple thing and tried to emotionally engage people at the ground," Schwab recalled.

The Dockers introduced a Purple Haze game against Richmond in 2003, with a man on the scoreboard wearing a wig and playing air guitar to the Jimi Hendrix song.

Subiaco Oval was turned into the "House of Purple", with the players wearing purple jumpers and fans given purple ponchos. The Dockers even picked a team of "purple people" featuring The Phantom, Tinky Winky and Dame Edna on a forward flank.

Membership soared and, importantly, the Dockers went from selling 11,000 to 39,000 seated tickets for matches and by 2004 the club was starting to fill Subiaco for games against Victorian teams.

Fremantle started to turn annual profits and by midway through 2005 had repaid its debt. "But when that started to happen we still didn't have a lot of infrastructure to make the most of it," Schwab said.

He also started to sense that some in WA footy circles believed the Dockers needed to know their place: as a niche club.

"You got a bit of a feeling that people wondered, 'If Freo becomes strong, what effect will it have on the cash cows that is the West Coast Eagles?'," Schwab said. "There was that feeling that some people weren't all that sure how successful they wanted Fremantle to be.

"But then I think what happened was when the Dockers grew so big, people started to realise that actually there was nothing wrong with having two powerful financial clubs in Perth."

Fremantle crowd

2008

BEING in the black helped improve the Dockers' on-field performance. "From that point onwards we started to be in a position to do the things that the better-resourced clubs were doing," Schwab said.

In 2006 the Dockers won their first final and made it as far as the preliminary final against Sydney. But the team then failed to make the eight in 2007, culminating in Connolly's resignation after the Round 20 loss to North Melbourne.

"We got to the end of 2007, which was just a messy and disappointing season, and probably realised that we had to take our football to another level," Schwab said.

On the surface, the 2008 season -- Fremantle's first under new coach Mark Harvey -- might just look like a mediocre six-win affair. But it was a turning point in the club's history.

The coaching staff and recruiting department were bolstered, while former Wallabies fitness coach Jason Weber came on board to overhaul the strength and conditioning department.

When Schwab flagged his intention to return home to Victoria to be closer to family, the Dockers found an internal replacement mid-season in Steve Rosich, who had been at the club for four years handling commercial and marketing affairs as well as player contracts and salary cap management.

Part of his pitch to the board was "to look at every aspect of the football club, with a particular focus on the football side of our operations".

"Our first focus, and primary focus, was the composition of our playing list, given that we didn’t feel that we had the list to take us where we wanted to go," Rosich said.

He said the Dockers' list was in the top 25 per cent in terms of age and games played, but "didn’t have the talent to challenge in the next few years".

"On that basis, and given that there were likely to be new teams entering the competition with list concessions, we felt that we needed to be proactive and aggressive in our list management strategies over the 2008-10 period."

The Dockers restructured the football department: Chris Bond went from an assistant coach to general manager of the football operations, while Brad Lloyd went from national recruiting manager to general manager player management.

"They’ve been integral for developing the strategy for our list and also executing that strategy," Rosich said.

They began with a bang, adding 14 players to the list going into the 2009 season, among them Stephen Hill, Hayden Ballantyne, Zac Clarke, Nick Suban, Michael Walters, Matt De Boer and Clancee Pearce, all of whom have key players in 2013.

Meanwhile, stalwarts such as Shaun McManus, Peter Bell, Josh and Matthew Carr, Jeff Farmer, Heath Black and Mark Johnson either retired or were given the old heave-ho at the end of 2008.

Shaun McManus

McManus, a former captain and fan favourite who played 228 games over 14 seasons, said the club's solid off-field performance had set the platform for expectations of sustained on-field achievement.

"The previous four years had been an opportunity missed in terms of on-field success," McManus said. "Although we'd made the 2006 prelim against Sydney, everybody was aware that a pretty good list had not achieved as much success as it perhaps should have.

"There was an overhaul and it was all about doing whatever it took to achieve sustained success."

With so many young men on the list, player development became a focus and Simon Lloyd was brought across from Collingwood to head up the program.

Nothing was overlooked in the club review, which Rosich described as proactive and aggressive.

The club's very brand was examined, with the Dockers logo and theme song both modernised. Feedback suggested the nickname "Dockers" and the colour purple both resonated in the community, so they remained sacrosanct.

But the playing uniform was overhauled. The original multi-hued jumper -- designed by the team who gave the world the boxing kangaroo -- was abandoned in favour of a more simple, elegant geurnsey. "We used to joke that the colours didn't clash with anyone else," Schwab chuckled, "they just clashed with each other."

The club also moved towards identifying a new training base. Once a pace-setter, the Fremantle facility and dropped to be in the AFL's bottom four.

The Dockers have since signed an agreement with the City of Cockburn, a fast-growing municipality within the greater Fremantle region, to relocate to a $107 million world-class facility by 2017. "It will be a standout facility not just in this country, but will compare very favourably to those that we've seen internationally," Rosich said.

Ross Lyon

2012

WHEN the Dockers failed to make the finals in 2011, the disappointment at Fremantle was palpable.

In keeping with the proactive and aggressive approach, the club looked at ways to act. Harvey had a year of his coaching contract to run, but there was speculation St Kilda coach Ross Lyon -- who had featured in three Grand Finals in the previous three seasons -- might be open to a change of scenery.

While Melbourne hovered in the wings, Rosich rang Lyon directly, conscious that he was managed by the same company that handled Harvey's interests.

"I took the opportunity to assess his interest personally and directly," Rosich said.

"I think we’ve got a responsibility to give our team, and each and every player, the best opportunity to succeed."

Lyon's appointment took Perth and the wider football community by surprise. Even Demetriou questioned the coup: "I think people are entitled to ask questions about issues of commitment (and) integrity," the AFL boss said.

"Nobody saw it coming," said McManus.

"First of all people were shocked and thought it was really rough on a guy who's got a year left to run on his contract and had taken the club to a couple of finals the year before, but after the initial shock they realised it was the club saying, 'Enough's enough, we want to be a part of the big time every year and this will be the guy to take us to consistent finals appearances and hopefully a premiership'."

The Dockers also assembled a completely new match committee around Lyon.

Although Lyon was under intense scrutiny, and initially endured some flak for a dour game style, he quickly won over the critics.

"The thing with Ross is that there is no real grey area," McManus said.

"The players know the game plan back to front, they're unbelievably well structured and they know the exact role that's expected of them -- if you deliver you're in the team and if you don't you're out.

Ross Lyon

"He's obviously a great game day coach but he also puts a lot of emphasis on the players taking ownership. It's got to that point where the senior players, and even the young blokes at times, put their hand up to have a crack at anyone who doesn't do the right thing at the right time."

Rosich believes Lyon's guidance may prove the missing piece in the puzzle.

"Since 2006, in off-field commercial measures, we've been in the top four-top six territory," Rosich said. The Dockers have a club record 44,000 members this season and will achieve a merchandise record.

"But one of our key focuses has been to play in regular finals series. This year will be the third in the past four years, and there are only six teams that have managed that over the same period (the others are Geelong, Hawthorn, Collingwood, Sydney and Carlton)."

Saturday's home preliminary final is the high-water mark of the Dockers' 19 seasons in the AFL, but as Rosich was quick to point out: "The bottom line is that we've achieved nothing yet.

"We recognise across the board that we haven’t achieved yet what we want to achieve, and there’s still much to be done."

As Lyon put it after the qualifying final win over Geelong: "At the minute we’re competing as a good football club but we know that’s fleeting. It’s only about your next performance, really."

Chris Mayne

The other long-standing joke about this club is that the only ship never to have docked at Fremantle is the premiership.

Given how hard the Dockers have worked to turn the tide over the past decade, though, don't be surprised if that ship appears on the horizon this weekend. And it is every chance to come in.