With the World Cup starting to wind down, the AFL needed a game to reassert itself into our imagination.
First v second? Potential Grand Final preview? Thursday night?
Perfect.
And while the game was impressive, particularly from Fremantle, it was a perfect example of Michael Corleone style winning battles but slowly winning wars right up until his wife gets an abortion behind his back likely facilitated by adopted brother.
The game showed what Fremantle and Sydney can both do when they’re up and running, but also the thing that will cause them to not win the premiership if indeed they don’t win the premiership.
Before we get into it, a word has to be said on Fremantle. After kicking 0.11 in the first half, the Fremantle hit squad went to work for another high-intensity deployment in the second half, dropping 100 points off 25 shots in 40 minutes of footy.
They just kick long to Treacy or Jackson from defence, swarm the footy once it hits the deck, win the ground ball and explode forward by hand until they get it into Murphy Reid, Andy Brayshaw or Shai Bolton’s hands to decide how and who should kick a goal. On Thursday night it worked perfectly. They were +25 in contested ball, +15 in ground balls, and +271 in handball metres gained. Those three players combined for 29 score involvements.
It was frightening and it was violent. They’re a right-angle team with the way they send the score worm completely vertical in short spaces of time. They are truly the Special Forces of the AFL, where they drop in, pull off high intensity, high-degree-of-difficulty missions, then drop out with the game won.
Last night was their Bin Laden operation.
Instead of focusing on what they did when the ball started rolling down the hill in the second half against Sydney, the bigger story is the way that Fremantle was able to stop the boulder rolling down the other way. The reason why is Alex Pearce.
Time and again, Pearce, playing on Hayden McLean, was able to roll off his man and just get in the way to stop the Sydney run. By player rating, he was one of Fremantle’s four best players in each of the first two quarters, as he occasionally looked like Atlas with the way that he held the Sydney tidal wave off.
While he only had seven spoils and 9 disposals, all of his possessions were off intercept, and he scored off four of them. It was classic Pearce, who is better than anyone at sensing when his team needs a lift and providing it, while also remaining responsible defensively and rarely getting out of possession.
But amid all of this praise, how is there a negative for Fremantle?
Did you see Charlie Curnow’s game?
It was a version of Jake Stringer’s game last week, which was a version of Jack Gunston’s game in round 9, which was a version of Shannon Neale’s game in round 1.
As the wider AFL has prioritised keeping the ground long so there’s space to run and carry into, the genuine full forward is back and not a moment too soon. Fremantle, with Luke Ryan and Brennan Cox, simply struggles to defend that. Neither guy would have lasted anywhere near as long as Tom Hanks did in Castaway because they both simply struggle on islands.
Cox is clearly better at it than Ryan, who benefits greatly from Sean Darcy being on the list to bear the brunt of the “skinny jibes”, but neither is better than a C+ in that area of their games.
Given Pearce generally prefers to play on a second and third tall to affect games more widely, this is going to be a problem for Fremantle going forward if Pearce won’t play on them. It is worth noting that the Pearce move onto the gun is a lever they can pull, and they did in the fourth term after Curnow’s scalding third, but it’s not what they want to do.
For Sydney, their flaw is less hidden. They’re like a Mario Kart player that can only go after using the rainbow strip in the corridor.
If it’s not open, they’ll try force it and get themselves beaten the other way because of the license Dean Cox has given everyone to scream forward.
As Fremantle started piling on goals in the fourth term on Thursday night, Sydney showed no ability to just slow the game down and try and take some sting out of it. They’re like Tim Tszyu who, when he’s in trouble, just tries to knock the other guy out rather than tying up and trying to live to fight another day.
Again and again, even their stars tried biting off near impossible kicks into a corridor that Fremantle had clogged up and they were destroyed the other way, with Freo kicking 7.10 off turnover and 10.7 from the defensive half.
That’s been the story for their last couple of months. As teams have cottoned onto their run and gun, corridor-centric style, they’ve seen that the Swans can be burned off turnover. Seven of their eight worst games at defending turnover have come in the last nine rounds, and their two worst games at defending back half scores have been against Brisbane and Fremantle.
If teams can win the ball off them, usually as they try to enter 50, the Swans are susceptible on the rebound and simply don’t have the key back horses to really defend outside of Tom McCartin.
The Sydney flaw is far more glaring, and likely more damaging than the Fremantle flaw long term, but the Fremantle flaw is there and the right team could exploit it.
Michael Corleone spent The Godfather 2 getting everything he ever wanted and losing everything he ever had. On Thursday night, we saw how the same process could play out as we head down the stretch of the 2026 AFL season.