DEJA VU

Thirteen years ago, a depleted Sydney side walked into a preliminary final against Fremantle and got suffocated. We went to a Grand Final. Tonight the same two clubs, the same fixture, the same casualty issues, except this time it’s at their place.

Fremantle: minor premiers, first preliminary final since 2015. Survived Geelong 18.12 (120) to 16.10 (106) in front of a club-record 59,725, having led by 31 early and then remembered we are Fremantle. Avoided becoming the seventh top-four side in six seasons to exit in straight sets. One win from the MCG.

Sydney: second, and battered in ways that have nothing to do with football. Dismantled reigning premiers Brisbane 21.15 (141) to 13.10 (88) at the SCG, then had a week off. Now without their captain, their vice-captain, and four other senior players. Somehow still favourites at home.

SEPTEMBER 21, 2013

Every purple person of a certain vintage can recall it. Patersons Stadium, 43,249 crammed in, the reigning premiers in town, and Fremantle producing the most extraordinary display of team pressure it had ever managed. 14.15 (99) to 11.8 (74). Twenty-five points, and it was never that close, the margin was fifty-four midway through the last quarter before Sydney kicked six of the final seven goals to make the scoreboard look respectable.

Mundy and Fyfe were colossal. Walters kicked three and took a screamer. Ryan Crowley held All-Australian Kieren Jack to eleven possessions while collecting twenty-two of his own and kicking a goal. Fremantle went to its first and only Grand Final off the back of that night. The Ross Lyon Kool-Aid was well and truly drunk.

Here is the detail that has gone largely unremarked this week, Sydney came into that preliminary final with half a team missing. Kurt Tippett out. Tom Mitchell out. Adam Goodes, Sam Reid, Rhyce Shaw, Alex Johnson, Mitch Morton and Martin Mattner all out. John Longmire said afterwards his side simply needed a few more fresh men. It was, in the Swans’ own retelling, always going to be a tough ask against a Dockers outfit at full noise.

Thirteen years later, the fixture has been reprinted with the same casualty list. We know how this story goes. We just have to do it away.

SYDNEY

Captain Callum Mills ruptured his ACL changing direction late in the first quarter of the qualifying final, a 29-year-old who has already missed a Grand Final through injury, now facing surgery and most of 2027 on the sidelines. Alongside him, the Pullman Five remain suspended by the club over their off-field indiscretions. Harry Cunningham has since strained a calf at training. That is seven players, including the captain and vice-captain, unavailable for a preliminary final.

What can be said, football-wise, is this: Sydney have absorbed all of it and then put 141 points on the reigning premiers. Logan McDonald kicked six, Charlie Curnow five, Tom Papley five — only the fifth trio in VFL/AFL history to manage that in a final. Errol Gulden ran the midfield like a man who’d decided the whole thing was his responsibility now. Dean Cox called it the most complete four-quarter performance of his tenure. A wounded, cornered football club at home in September is the most dangerous animal in the sport, and any Docker who walks in there expecting a depleted rabble will be walking out at quarter time wondering what hit them.

FINALS HISTORY

These clubs have met four times in finals, and the record stands at two apiece. Sydney won the 2006 preliminary final by 35 points. We won the 2013 preliminary final by 25. Sydney won the 2014 qualifying final by 24. We won the 2015 qualifying final by nine.

Look closer. Every single one of those was won by the home side. Sydney’s two came at their place. Ours came at ours. Nobody in the history of this fixture has won a final on the road, and tonight we are asked to be the first, at the SCG, a tight, awkward ground with the scoreboard end that has swallowed better teams than this one, in front of a crowd that has spent a fortnight being told their club is under siege. This is the hardest assignment Fremantle has faced all year.

BUT ALSO: ROUND EIGHTEEN

Against which, the most recent evidence. Round 18, Optus Stadium, the Starlight Purple Haze Game. Fremantle went goalless in the first half for only the third time in the club’s history and then kicked one hundred points after the main break, including nine goals in the final quarter, to beat this same Sydney outfit by 38. It remains one of the craziest sixty minutes of football played by anyone in 2026.

Yes, it was in Perth. Yes, Sydney had a full list that night. But the point stands and it is the point this whole season has been built on: when this team finds its rhythm, nothing in the competition can live with it for a half. Last Friday against Geelong we watched a 31-point lead evaporate and then watched Luke Jackson refuse to let the season end — 25 disposals, 35 hitouts and two goals, a final for the ages, before Patrick Voss put it beyond doubt in the dying seconds, causing a new AFL rule interpretation in the process. That is the fourth time this year Jackson has personally dragged us out of a hole. He is the best big man in the competition right now and tonight he gets one of the toughest opponents in Grundy, own this ruck contest and we’re on the way.

THE TEAM NEWS

An unchanged Fremantle side is the loudest possible statement of confidence. The one genuine selection question was Brennan Cox, who has recovered from his calf and would have offered a lockdown option on one of Sydney’s three tall forwards and the match committee has instead sent him to play in Peel’s WAFL Grand Final. You either back the group that just survived a final or you don’t. Longmuir does.

Sydney bring in Lewis Melican specifically to handle Treacy, Amiss and Voss and the returning Justin McInerney, playing his first senior game since Round 13 after fifteen weeks out with a hamstring. Asking a man to walk off a fifteen-week layoff straight into a preliminary final is either inspired or desperate. Dane Rampe, 36 years old and 288 games deep, leads them out as stand-in skipper. He has lost four Grand Finals in red and white and delivered the losing speech at two of them. If you can’t see why that man is dangerous tonight, you haven’t been paying attention.

HOW IT GETS WON

Three things, and Fremantle needs at least two.

• Jackson must own the ruck. Every hitout to advantage at the SCG is worth double, because the ground is small and the corridor is narrow and clean clearance ball is the only reliable way to score there. Serong, Brayshaw, Young and Bolton at the feet of a dominant Jackson is our best version. It is also exactly what happened last Friday.

• Somebody has to go to Gulden. With Mills gone and Heeney unavailable, Errol Gulden is carrying that midfield on his own and is good enough to do it. He ran the show against Brisbane. If he gets thirty-five uncontested touches and directs traffic all night, Sydney win. Corey Wagner or Matt Johnson will be handed the least glamorous and most important job of the season.

• The forward line cannot go missing again. Five goalkickers with one each got us beaten by Hawthorn. Against Geelong we kicked eighteen. Treacy, Amiss and Voss against a defence missing its captain and reshuffled around a recalled Melican is the most favourable matchup Fremantle will get all September. Take it.

THE CONDITIONS, AND THE VIEW FROM PERTH

Sydney tonight is about as good as it gets: sunny through the day, mild, light winds easing into the evening, no rain in sight. A dry ball and a firm deck at a ground where skill and composure decide things. There will be no weather to hide behind and no excuse available to the loser.

For those of us at home, the bounce is 5:40pm our time which means finishing work early, ignoring your family, and being seated well before the first bounce. There is no eastern-states timeslot inconvenience to complain about this week, which is frankly disorienting. A good chunk of the Purple Army has made the trip east. The rest of us will be watching through our fingers from the other side of the country.

THE VERDICT

Everything sensible says Sydney. Home ground, a week off, a fixture in which no visitor has ever won, a cornered club with a cause and a crowd that will be deafening from the first bounce. Gulden will be enormous. Curnow and McDonald will kick goals. There will be a twenty-minute stretch where it feels like 2015 all over again and you consider turning it off.

But we have Luke Jackson in the form of his life, the deepest midfield in the competition, three key forwards against a reshuffled defence, and a group that has spent a fortnight being told it is a fraud. Nineteen wins. A minor premiership. A survival act against Geelong. This team has earned the right to be believed in, and one night in Sydney is all that separates it from the last Saturday in September.

Fremantle by 8