I kept this article from 2006. It almost brought a tear to my eye back then. I post it here for a number of reasons:

i Not because I'm trying to relive a brief moment of glory from 2 years ago, but...

ii we need to be reminded that winners get good media, no matter how bad they were a few weeks ago, or even if they're Freo and have been bad forever. Of course, if Harves manages to turn things around soon, Walls' will say the defining moment was when he grilled him on the couch. He is so far ahead in Hackdorn votes it may as well be closed for the season right now.

ii All of the names mentioned here still play for us. None of them were crabs then, nor are they now. WC, however, has a rooted list.

iii Belief is the name of the game. Melbourne proved it in a half of footy against a much better side running on half empty.


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Upstart Dockers hit and run
Chip Le Grand
August 28, 2006

IN the space of one Sunday afternoon, the 2006 season has been turned on its head. The Adelaide Crows, for so long considered unbackable for this year's premiership, forgot what it was to win. The West Coast Eagles, for so much of the year a grinding, midfield machine, lost the will to run. And the Fremantle Dockers, a club yet to achieve anything, are the rightful favourites for the flag.

The Dockers have not undone a season's work by the Eagles, and Crows, in two hours of football. But any reasonable person at a sun-drenched Subiaco Oval yesterday could question the merits of Fremantle's claim. Fremantle did not merely beat its great cross-river rival. Nor did it merely thrash the Eagles. It did so with the kind of hard-running, precise football of which modern premierships are made.

"I think they are the form team of the comp," West Coast coach John Worsfold said. "Where Adelaide were a month ago."

For more than an hour, the Eagles could not kick a goal. In the same period, Fremantle kicked 11. From being the dominant team in the first quarter, the Eagles could not find a way forward in the next two. From being the team left in dogged pursuit in that opening term, the Dockers ran off to play the next three on their terms.

Where the wheels of the Eagles midfield span without traction and purpose, Fremantle discovered a wide boulevard to goal. Where the Eagles lost Daniel Kerr before the start of the match and Andrew Embley before half-time, the Dockers finished with everyone fit and running.

For the most part, the Eagles had as much of the ball, and Ben Cousins was as good as any player on the ground. Fittingly, it was Cousins who kicked the goal to thaw a frozen West Coast scoreboard at the start of the final quarter. Yet for much of the game, a team that had turned football into a lung-busting foot race found itself out of puff.

Quentin Lynch, the feel-good story of a rebuilt forward line, played on a very good defender in Luke McPharlin and could mark neither in front nor on his chest. Ashley Sampi, a late inclusion for Kerr, was thrown into the midfield as an emergency measure and did not have an impact.

The frustration for Worsfold is that the same deficiency which stood between the Eagles and a last year's premiership has emerged at the pointy end of another season. By three-quarter time, West Coast had manufactured a paltry four goals.

One thing coaches agree on is that winning a flag in today's heavily equalised competition has much to do with being the right team in the right shape at the right time. If this is true, the Dockers are best-placed to win the lot. Is Fremantle prepared to be the focus of the competition heading into September?

"I think we are, because there has been a huge focus on us being a basket case," Fremantle coach Chris Connolly said.

"We have been the butt of jokes in AFL football, we've been seen to be a basket case and all those types of things, but all the time been able to maintain focus on our plan. I think that gives you a certain amount of resolve and it is that resolve that we will be calling on."

On Saturday, Melbourne faltered at Skilled Stadium and drew a game against the Cats it had controlled until half-time. Melbourne remains fourth and can seal a double chance if it beats the Crows on Saturday in Adelaide. But of the top-four teams, only the Dockers emerged from this tumultuous weekend with a win. It is eight weeks since they lost.

To understand the belief coursing through these Dockers, you only had to see the split-second decision by Jeff Farmer to flick the ball high over his right shoulder into the path of Michael Johnson and the Brett Peake goal which followed.

Farmer's action was so audacious as to be absurd, yet he carried it off with the nonchalance of a sunbaker shooing a fly. For those who couldn't quite believe what they saw, Farmer performed a similar stunt down the other end of the ground. This time the grateful recipient was Fremantle captain Peter Bell.

Yet gone are the days when Fremantle rose and fell on the unpredictable genius of Farmer -- a genius growing more predictable every week.

If the stereotype of the old, keystone Dockers was one of freakish hits and silly misses, the foundation of this team is the calm awareness of Michael Johnson and David Mundy in the back half, the uncompromising work of Josh Carr and Bell through the midfield and a potent forward line built around Farmer, Matthew Pavlich and Des Headland.

Yesterday's results mean West Coast will most likely finish the season atop the ladder and Fremantle third. This would leave the Eagles hosting one qualifying final and the Dockers travelling to Adelaide to play the other.

It is no longer the stuff of parochial, West Australian fancy for these two teams to meet in a historic, derby grand final. On form and circumstance, there are not two better teams in the competition. And none better than the Dockers.