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The walking wounded host the travelling wounded, in a game that proves the 22-game AFL grind gives zero Fs about your best-laid plans. Both sides are out of the race for 2016, but their futures will still be on show.
In March, a Friday night game between Fremantle and Collingwood at the MCG would have been penciled in as an eight-shaping contest. As it stands, the loser will end the round in the bottom four and be at least a win away from escaping the cellar.
How times change. Coming into the year, the Dockers were a premiership fancy, while the Pies were a fashionable choice to make a leap into finals. Through injury, form and the vagaries of the largest team sport in the world, those visions have turned into nightmares.
On Wednesday, it was reported that Fremantle have just 28 players available for selection on a list of 47, following injuries to five players in the AFL and WAFL over the weekend passed. Remarkably, Collingwood are similarly hobbled, although the volume of injuries is not as dire as at Fremantle. That’s perhaps the biggest shame of this game – the quality of players on the sidelines is plain sad.
Fremantle: Nat Fyfe, Aaron Sandilands, Harley Bennell, Michael Johnson, Alex Pearce.
Collingwood: Dane Swan, Jamie Elliott, Alex Fasolo, Taylor Adams, Darcy Moore.
But we shall persist, because it is Australian rules football, and it is Friday, and these are two glorious things combined to form one more glorious thing. Also, have you seen the rest of the weekend? Yikes.
Markets have this one priced as a narrow Collingwood victory, which undersells what the Dockers have pulled together over the past three weeks. Fremantle are 3-0, admittedly with two victories against sides with a combined two wins on the year, and look like a team much more comfortable in their new, rebuild-ey skin.
Last weekend’s home win against Port Adelaide, who were beginning to look like the team most likely to pinch a finals spot, was built on the contributions of veterans and regulars in the team: Michael Barlow’s 43 touches, nine clearances and two goals; Matthew Pavlich’s four goals; Lachie Neale’s continued emulation of miniature Hercules.
The Power were flat on the day, in a game that was supposedly theirs for the taking.
A Fremantle win tonight would give the Dockers a four-game winning streak heading into their mid-season bye. It also shapes as one of the last times that Fremantle can be expected to be within cooee of their opponents in 2016. The Dockers are set to finish the year with a five-game top eight slate featuring Sydney, West Coast, Adelaide, GWS and the Western Bulldogs.
The Dockers have been disappointing, but they got all of the disappointment out of their system early in the year. Collingwood, by contrast, have lurched from bad loss to bad loss for the whole year.
So far in 2016, Collingwood have beaten Richmond by a point (on a final play that Richmond completely ballsed up), Essendon by 69 points, Brisbane by 78 points, and somehow, Geelong by 24 points. Do you see a pattern here? The Pies have beaten up on the teams that the rest of the competition are beating up on, and been made to look mediocre by the rest. Ditto the Dockers.
A loss to Fremantle tonight would put a bottom four finish firmly in play for the Pies, given they face six of the top eight in their final nine games – albeit they leave their cushy Victorian confines on two more occasions.
From here it is almost certain that coach Nathan Buckley will steward his team to four straight years with a loss tally greater than the previous season. But a win tonight could see them enter next Saturday night’s game against Carlton with more of a spring in their step, and a chance to get to six wins for the year in the lead up to their nightmarish run home.
Compounding the misery for Collingwood is that they’re out their first round pick in the 2016 draft, which I’d hazard a guess is likely to be much higher in the draft than the football department was expecting when it dealt it to the Giants as part of the Adam Treloar trade.
We’ve established that neither team are much chop in 2016. Both sides have beaten up on Brisbane and Essendon, and unexpectedly beaten one much more fancied opponent. Collingwood have an extra win on the board, but that victory was by a single point. We’re clearly watching two teams with big short-term challenges on their hands this evening.
So it isn’t the top eight shaping game we thought it could be at the start of the season, but there’s still plenty on the line for both teams.
There isn’t a whole heap to read into the Xs and Os in this game, given neither team has really established a winning mode for itself. That fact makes it hard to pick a winner on anything more than gut feel.
Both sides have had trouble scoring this season – if we exclude the big wins garnered against the Dons and Lions, the Pies have averaged 71.6 points per game, and the Dockers 69.4 points per game. Those marks would put them 16th and 17th, respectively, on the season, ahead of Essendon’s anti-score unit. This isn’t going to be an all-timer in a scoring sense.
The midfield match-up looks intriguing, though. Fremantle’s young midfield group has given the team some drive in recent weeks, as the more established guys attract the attention of the opposition.
Neale is a near-certainty to make the All-Australian squad at the very least, while Michael Walters is looking comfortable spending extra time in the guts. The Dockers’ depth has been provided by a cavalcade of young players, and they are providing enough support to keep Fremantle from capitulating.
Collingwood’s midfield issues aren’t so much at the top – Adam Treloar, Scott Pendlebury and Steele Sidebottom have played almost all of the year, and are doing their thing – but in the second and third tiers. The supporting cast to the super stars has been shown up as B-grade, and in need of work. They’re still young as a collective, and so there’s time, but time isn’t an input into tonight’s game. In a battle of youth versus youth, I’ll take Fremantle’s form over Collingwood’s promise.
So I’ll go against the grain a little here, and pick a travelling Fremantle to eek their way over the line. Fremantle by 18 points.
It doesn’t shape as a colossal battle between teams with September ambition, but it is a game of football on a Friday night at the MCG nonetheless. There aren’t a whole stack of these left, so savour them all, because we’re closer to a football-less October than we are to a March full of promise.
Sidebar: Is this Travis Cloke’s Ross Lyon audition?
Maligned, discarded, and ridiculed, Travis Cloke hasn’t had the most enjoyable 2016 season. He’s almost certainly going to be shopped around the league once this season is over, and Fremantle have been anointed a potential suitor.
He’s 29, but with a near-unblemished injury history, strong one-on-one marking abilities when the ball is being delivered quickly, and a proven ability to work hard when he wants to. Sounds like the kind of project Ross Lyon takes on in his spare time. He doesn’t fit snugly into Fremantle’s 2020 deadline, but key forwards don’t grow on trees unless you are the GWS Giants.