By Seven Hours Behind

"Pressure makes diamonds".
    (General Patton, WWII US General)

There isn't much that beats your team still playing in September. From the amateur country league to the AFL, it's still the same feeling. You sense the atmosphere change around football clubs when finals arrive. Everyone from the finance office to the physiotherapy table walks with an added spring in their step. It can't be avoided. Players - and especially supporters - are caught up in the enthusiasm that comes with possibility. The media and fan numbers swell at open training sessions. Supporters from the member to the casual observer lose focus at work and find themselves subconsciously floating back to the internet to see if the smallest news update might affect the upcoming fixture. Flights and match tickets are frantically purchased with little care for the expenses. After all, who knows when the next time might be. 2006 sure seems a long time ago now.  

Friday night was an excellent performance and one to be be proud of. The margin might have been close but we were good enough for long enough. Watching the game interstate, there was a begrudging nod from the Carlton supporters and other onlookers in the pub with me saying this was a steely showing. Our clearance work deserves particular mention, which has come so far in twelve months. The similarities with 2003 are uncanny. We were tested under lights in Round 22 that year which decided where we would finish. That time it was a decent West Coast team and an epic derby win which meant we secured a home final. That year was also a side of young players with their best ahead of them. Carlton were a stern test and one I think we will be grateful for. Hopefully next week is a different result to 2003. The exciting part now is that anything is possible.

There is a natural order to things and form displayed through the season is generally a good indicator. This year there seemed an even spread. A number of teams displayed a combination of pedigree, depth or the belief that comes with being premiers or close to it in recent years. With the form of several weeks ago, none of us would've been surprised if Geelong, Collingwood, St Kilda, Hawthorn or the Western Bulldogs were on the podium at the end of Grand Final Day. This picture has narrowed somewhat since and there are now two (more than others) with credentials and a worthy claim. Then again, stranger things have happened and all five Victorian teams mentioned above have the key ingredients of a premiership side: (1) several 'game-changers' who can break off their opponents and do something special when a game and season are in the balance; (2) a solid core of 'middle-tier' players (usually 5th-15th in a best and fairest count) who can outplay their opponents of respective or superior ability; and (3) an experienced coach who can use his flexible players to best effect or call on key position players to do something special.

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By Seven Hours Behind

Another derby is upon us.  Say what the players might about how they treat this game like any other, I (and every other Fremantle supporter) certainly do not.  The buildup might become consumed with the present state of the two teams - and our (hopefully temporary) slide to fifth - but fifteen years since the first and ten years since the most important derby suggest a bit of perspective is in order.  As is often my inclination when penning thoughts, a brief glance into the past always gives the present a different look. 

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By Seven Hours Behind

People are creatures of habit and custom and as everyone from Esperance to Katherine is all too aware, these are unprecedented times for one of WA's teams.  The publicans of the state's many alehouses have heard one long composite conversation over the last fifteen years about poor draft choices, ill-considered trades, games that should have been won and the begrudging acceptance of Fremantle's place with mediocrity.  Since 1995, flashes of brilliance have been tempered with moderate quality. These however are not times for such fruitless reflection.  It is worth instead to recall where the exceptions have been and what lessons exist for the 2010 vintage.    

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by Guy Smiley

I'm a bit lost this season, to be rather intimate and honest with you. A tad aimless and missing some direction. I had, for the first 14 years or so of my burgeoning career as a spittle flecked footy supporter, something to direct my passion against. Something to vent my stupendous spleen on. Something to drag me away from these types of warmly intimate confessions best shared in some dark back alley, accompanied by the vague scent of cheap vodka and the lingering nightmare of 2 dollar shop perfume. Hence, the spleen.

I've proudly shouldered the underdog burden and argued my way into and out of more frighteningly satisfying turgid footy arguments than the dog's had... hey, the back lawn's got a lot of brown spots. I got used to it. I got good at it. No-one did underdog better than me. The bloke who wrote the original Kama Sutra rang me last year for some inside tips on the Underdog, the Double Underdog and the Double Dog no under... but a man has to keep a couple of trademarks protected, after all. I reckon I took a gentle sort of pride in being a better class of underdog than yer avridge Ooftit supporter, f'rinstance, but that's hardly something to crow about. What would that lot of slinking yellow striped badger botherers know about underdogging? I actually have to work withing phone range of a couple of Bulldog supporters, too... and you'd think that mob of mongrel punts would have an idea of the scope involved in successfully underdogging in the modern world but it looks, unsurprisingly, as if they're a serious risk to badger wellbeing as well.

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by Drubbing

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I think the weekend game was all about Reps. In one thread it was called 'the loss we had to have', but I think it goes deeper than that. We don't have enough Reps. Yet.

Reps are easy to understand: The more you do something, the better you will be. You can't go to the gym and bench-press 100kg without doing the hard work, the Reps, to get there.

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Trying to follow Drubbing's act is like trying to get sense out of an Eagle supporter..you can't.

(By the way, Drubbing, that was top shelf, son.) (and WHERE is Mish?)

But it did get the addled oos braincells in motion.

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Someone had to have something to say about Sunday's game. But more importantly, dare to suggest what it means...

We've had false dawns (2nd half of 2006) and Messiahs - Modra, Pavlich and Wiz - who were going to win us a premiership of their own boot. Bad luck, no luck, and good luck that went bad before we got any good out of it. We've embraced a victim complex, an inferiority complex and 14 different kind of complexes about having a complex, and turned it all into a celebration of quirky uniqueness. 

The umps and AFL have noticed this and obliged along the way, adding to the pathological house-hoarding of complexes.We've had umpire marks, games almost pinched off us well after they've finished, umpire's checking with the opposition as to what they should do... a woeful tribunal/report record, with our latest goal sneak being pinged (despite being the wrong colour) for Assault by Fingertips... the list goes on, and it will.

Mostly though, on and off, except for some extended purple patches, we've sucked a fair bit too, which makes you a soft target for oxygen thieves like Robert Walls, anyone with a mic at 6PR, and social misfits forced to write sports copy through a fug of liquid lunches, and a tenuous grip on the facsimile they call reality over at the West, or the Sunday paper I can't remember the name of, but has lot of adverts in it. 

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Can you predict, with certainty? Would you know football clubs' positions on the AFL ladder come the end of Round 22? Of course not. (By the way, if a resounding "Yes!" bounced around your noggin as you read this intro, you need help. Medical help; and now.)

However, the popular theory of The Wisdom of Crowds suggest that you (singular) cannot, whereas you (plural) do have this knowledge. Perhaps this is just a modern take on Emile Durkheim's "collective consciousness", so let's put it to the test.

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Middle of a heatwave, Perth style. All of us are drawn, despite our better judgement, into commenting on the weather. The full spectrum of inanities are being tossed about with gay abandon and none of us seem to give a flying fat rat's about it. It's 'kin hot, eh?

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