Narratives are a powerful thing in sport. Heading into the 2015 season, a lot has been made about the age and experience of two AFL lists in particular.

The age of a list should be of little concern in the here and now, and experience should be viewed as a positive. But strangely, the age and experience of one team is being viewed through the prism of disadvantage, and for another, as the spark needed to push them into genuine contention.

Here he goes again…
It’s starting to look pretty eery, isn’t it?

Paul Roos’ disciple Ross Lyon has got his team to the pointy end of the AFL ladder two years running. The team all know their roles, and execute well. An ageing core of trusted stars and role players play a defence-first brand, but struggle when the time comes to put on scores large enough to beat the dominant offensive sides.

A grand final loss, to the best side of the era, isn’t enough to shake Lyon’s resolve, as he persists with the list he mostly inherited from his predecessor. It’s 2010, and St Kilda are coming off a 12-point loss to Geelong after recording the best regular season record (20-2) since Essendon’s almost-perfect season in 2000.

What, you thought I was talking about Fremantle? It’s starting to look pretty eery, isn’t it?

Ross Lyon marshals his troops in the 2013 AFL Grand Final. (Photo: Sean Garnsworthy/AFL Media)

Lyon was poached from St Kilda after the 2011 season, replacing incumbent Dockers coach Mark Harvey in a relatively bloodless coup engineered by the brass at Fremantle.

There was a feeling in the west that Harvey had developed a stellar list, but one that wasn’t defensive enough to succeed in September. A seventh placed finish on the defensive points per game ladder in Harvey’s penultimate season belied a tendency to concede more than 100 points per game.

So the move was made, and the impact was as sudden as it was dramatic. Lyon had them immediately playing top-tier defence, with the Dockers dropping their defensive points per game to 77 in 2012, 69 in 2013, and 71 in 2014.

Three consecutive finals berths have justified the swiftness of the leadership team’s move, even if the list was primed to move regardless of who was driving.

It was a very similar pattern to Lyon’s time at St Kilda, although ex-coach Grant Thomas had the Saints playing finals footy from 2004 through 2006 (including two preliminary finals). A ninth-placed finish in 2007 was the only time in Lyon’s tenure that the Saints missed out on September.

But back to Freo. It says something of the power of storytelling that the footy world’s consensus is that Fremantle are on the downswing, in large part because of what Lyon managed to engineer – or not engineer – in his time at St Kilda.

The Dockers are getting old, and have been one of the least powerful offensive sides in the AFL over the past three years. The former issue is something that largely can’t be fixed, but the latter is the result of tactical choice.

After making the grand final in 2013 – and kicking themselves out of it in the first half – Ross Lyon told a Western Australian newspaper that the Dockers needed to kick another couple of goals per game to make it back. A lot was made of it at the time, and quite rightly.

Searching for offence
In 2015, defence only gets you so far, and as I highlighted in my last column, Hawthorn has shown the path to AFL enlightenment in an age of low scores is to double down on offence. A further point of evidence is the masters of defence themselves, the Dockers, are 0-10 in games where they concede more than 100 points.

In saying that, Hawthorn have only won one of their games when the other side has cracked the century. The Hawks just score so heavily that the opposition very rarely gets a chance to get on top of them.

Notwithstanding, the Dockers are actually well on their way to the extra two goals they’re looking for. On the offensive side of the ball, Lyon’s Fremantle have scored 88.9, 92.5 and 92.2 points per game in 2012 through 2014 respectively. That’s an extra 3.3 points per game, but comes at a time where the AFL average points per game has fallen from 92.1 in 2012 to 86.5 in 2014.

If you’re still reading at this point, it means the Dockers have improved from -2.2 points per game relative to the AFL average to +5.7 per game, an increase of 7.9 in the side’s relative offensive output.

But there’s still a chasm between the Hawks and the Dockers on the scoreboard, and the Hawks have made a habit of touching up the Purple Haze (West Australians hate that phrase, by the way) in the past few years. The Dockers are -152 on score differential against the Hawks in their last five games, despite recording a win in Round 21 last season 110-91.

Hawthorn are one of only four sides Fremantle has a negative differential against in their five previous encounters, and it’s really only three when you consider Lyon’s recent disdain for his previous employer (Fremantle are -127 against St Kilda).

And so the quest continues. Three consecutive 100-plus performances to round out 2014’s regular season hinted they have the capability. A straight sets exit from the finals suggests there is a way to go.

Personnel and preferences
But fortunately for the Dockers, there’s plenty of upside on the offensive side of the ball. The most significant is that their two small forwards, Hayden Ballantyne and Michael Walters, have played together in just 24 of the past 49 Fremantle games.

Michael Walters missed much of the 2014 season. How significant an in will he be in 2015? (Photo: Sean Garnsworthy/AFL Media)

When both have played, the Dockers have scored 95.1 points per game, compared to 87.2 when one or both are missing. Their points per game when both are playing would have been good enough for a top four offence last season.

With both small forwards in the line-up, Fremantle’s forward set-up looks very well structured and settled. Matthew Pavlich, now in his 16th season in the league, will surely become a more stay-at-home option in the forward line.

He’ll be flanked by at least one of Ballantyne and Walters at all times (there is a lot of talk about Walters in particular heading into the midfield more this season), Chris Mayne on the flank (surely he’s the 2012-2013 Mayne not the 2014 Mayne), one of Zac Clarke or Aaron Sandilands as the resting ruckman, and one of the young talls drafted in recent years as the third option. Nat Fyfe will do his thing, too. It’s a sneaky-potent line up forward of the ball.

But that’s not the problem. The problem, according to Champion Data, is Fremantle’s ability to transition the ball from the defensive half of the ground upon taking possession and score. They are the anti-Port Adelaide. Port’s surge up the ladder has been driven by their much talked about ‘wave running’, which results in a fast style of play, not dissimilar to Geelong during their period of dominance (although they rely more on kicking than Geelong).

Last season, Fremantle managed to transition just 18 per cent of possessions gained in their defensive 50 metre arc to inside 50s. Port Adelaide, by contrast, converted 26 per cent – a 45 per cent difference. It’s driven mostly by Lyon’s preference for a hard forward press.

The NBA’s Stan Van Gundy describes the thinking behind the hard press pretty well, but it’s essentially the tactic of pushing your defensive lines a long way up the offensive side of the ground to make it hard for a team to get the ball out and begin the transition.

It means Fremantle are a defensive powerhouse, but it also makes it really hard to fluidly transition forward. Everyone’s focus is on ensuring the press is set, rather than on the fast break. It doesn’t mean they don’t have the occasional fastbreak – as this little snippet from last season shows (sorry Hawks fans, your newest purchase gets Ballantyne-d at the end of this passage).

This is reinforced by Fremantle’s Offensive Efficiency Rating (OER) breakdown. The Dockers ranked seventh last season, achieving a +7.0 (remember, Hawthorn were +29.7). Of those sides above them, Fremantle were significantly lower on inside 50s (50.1 vs an average of 53.7), lower on conversion rate (47.8 per cent vs 48.1 per cent) and above average on crude accuracy (56.4 per cent vs 55.1 per cent). This confirms it’s not the forward line itself that is the issue – it’s getting the ball there.

Is there anything they can do to help make themselves more attacking? Personally, I think they need to take a leaf out of Richmond’s book and try to play more like Hawthorn. I would rate Fremantle’s midfield as second or third best in the competition, behind the Hawks, on par or slightly ahead of Sydney, and ahead of Essendon, North Melbourne, Geelong and Brisbane. But they operate differently to the Hawks, and to the team’s detriment.

Their starting five midfielders (Mundy, Barlow, Fyfe, Hill and Neale) have a combined disposal efficiency of 67.1 per cent, but a kick-to-handball ratio of 1.14. Hawthorn, by contrast, have an efficiency of 73.5 per cent, and a kick-to-handball ratio of 1.23 in their starting five (Hodge, Mitchell, Lewis, Burgoyne and Hill).

We covered what makes the Hawks so great in my last column so I won’t revisit here, other than to say Fremantle should place greater emphasis on getting their offence flowing through unstructured play, which still gives the facility to fall back to the press if attacking thrusts don’t pay off.

I don’t see the Dockers playing a Port Adelaide style of running in waves, but I do see them being able to play a hybrid model that leans on a Hawthorn-esque ability to move the ball and the over-the-back attack play sometimes employed by the Power. They do have the two best small forwards in the competition, after all.

Is their time running out?
I normally don’t like to pinch concepts from other people, but there’s a word that sums up where the Dockers find themselves in 2015: they have a case of Ross-teoporosis.

Let’s not spend too much time on this because Fox Sports covered it pretty well at that link. Fremantle are old. Not massively old (their average age is 25.5, compared to the AFL average of around 24), but of most concern is nine of their best 22 are 29 or older. These are players that are into at least their eighth AFL season, and in many cases well into their second decade in the league.

It was a common criticism of Lyon’s tenure at St Kilda, and it looks like this time Ross has listened. Fremantle’s midfield stocks are very strong, and increasingly young. On the forward line they have two solid young talls coming through. Zac Clarke is ready to take the mantle from Aaron Sandilands. On the defensive front there’s certainly an argument that there isn’t an instant replacement for Luke McPharlin, but who other than Hawthorn (there they are again) can claim depth in the key position defender stakes?

The loss of the Rolls Royce of AFL taggers Ryan Crowley will hurt, but it might be a net positive if it means a more offensively minded player takes his spot. The popular candidate seems to be Matt De Boer, who has played a tagging role in the past. He’s a better attacking player than Crowley, and might be more conducive to a flexible offensive structure than the pure tag offered by Crowley.

Fremantle tagger Ryan Crowley, with his favourite tagging target Brent Harvey. (Photo: Will Russell/AFL Media)

It’ll be one of the more interesting features of the Dockers’ play in the first few rounds, given they start against Port, Geelong, West Coast and Sydney.

Another known unknown is the impact that Anthony Morabito will have on the Fremantle offence. Three knee reconstructions have derailed his career, which started with a bang in the 2010 season as he played the full season in his inaugural year in the league. It’s hard to believe he was taken above Nat Fyfe, but at pick four he was behind just Tom Scully, Jack Trengove and Dustin Martin in that year’s class.

Another niggle in the pre-season will delay his start to the season, but if he manages to get right he could add another attacking bow to Fremantle’s midfield, or more likely as a half back flanker.

Just on that, everyone seems to have forgotten that the Dockers were decimated by injury in the second half of last year, losing both of their key defenders for the finals series. Michael Barlow played through injury for much of the year, Walters missed 16 games and the underrated Nick Suban missed games.

Offsetting this to some degree was that Sandilands managed to play the whole season – the first time he’d done so since 2008. His ability to keep on the park will be critical.

I’m of the opinion that while their time to win a flag for their captain may be running out, there is nothing to suggest there is an imminent, post-Lyon St Kilda implosion on the cards out west.

Fremantle will be thereabouts again in 2015, and while I’ve already picked Hawthorn for the flag I believe the Dockers can give it a good shake this season. After all, Lyon’s law says season four is when he gets his sides at their peak.

When age is a strength
Let’s finish off with a return to my first premise: narratives are very powerful in the AFL. Fremantle are out of it because they’re old. And yet, the most pervasive argument I’ve heard for North Melbourne’s forecast rise up the ladder this year is that they’ve gotten old.

In case you missed it, North Melbourne have been conducting the AFL’s first growth-based free agent experiment, signing Nick Dal Santo, Robin Nahas, Jarrad Waite and Shaun Higgins in recent years. Nahas lasted one season, but the other three are set to figure in North’s plans in the upcoming season.

Their addition to the team, as well as the general oldness of senior players like Brent Harvey, Drew Petrie, Michael Firrito and even Daniel Wells (who’ll turn 30 this year believe it or not), has pushed North from the fourth youngest list in 2012 to the second oldest list heading into 2015.

Now, I don’t think this matters at all. What matters is what you can do with the players you have. And I think the addition of Waite and Higgins will help boost a surprising weakness of North Melbourne: forward line potency.

In 2014, North Melbourne ranked eighth on my OER rating (+6.8), with average entries (50.0 vs 50.2 in the AFL), the best conversion rate (50.4 per cent of inside 50s led to scores, compared to 46.1 per cent overall and above even Hawthorn) and a slightly below average crude scoring accuracy (52.5 per cent vs 53.8 per cent).

One of the criticisms of North has been their lack of a genuine tall forward line. Ben Brown will rise this season – I think he’s got the potential to join the rapidly burgeoning dominant two-metre tall player club (we need to come up with a name for that by the way) – but tall forwards don’t improve as rapidly as smaller players do. I don’t think you’d argue Drew Petrie is in the top ten when it comes to key position forwards in the AFL.

Adding Jarrad Waite, who is maligned and rightly so, will help by giving the opposition another marking target to think about. Waite/Petrie/Brown sounds reasonably imposing, no?

Meanwhile, the addition of Shaun Higgins as a high half forward will give opposition sides more of a difficult choice when it comes to who to target on the outside. The perennial choice has been Brent Harvey, who I rate as one of the 20 best players in the AFL, but the addition of Higgins, and a fully-prepared Daniel Wells, makes this more of a dilemma.

Higgins played his 2014 for the Dogs like a cricket writer being asked to write about curling, and his pre-season form for North has plenty of people excited.

The power of story telling
OK, let’s wrap this one up. Eagle-eyed readers will notice that North’s OER was less than Fremantle’s last year. The Dockers were +7.0; North were +6.8.

Hang on a minute. Aren’t Fremantle in trouble because they can’t score heavily enough?

And they aren’t in the running because they’re too old?

Narratives are a powerful thing in sport.