Those are the words to our club song that, just moments ago, reverberated around Patersons Stadium after the final siren sounded to confirm our place in the 2013 AFL Grand Final.
It took two hours of relentless, uncompromising football against the team that brought those terms into vogue – the Sydney Swans.
Many will proclaim Ross Lyon the Messiah, the man who turned our fortunes around in the two years he’s been here.
As we head into our first grand final, the Fremantle Dockers are now a club based on a culture of hard work, discipline and respect.
There’s no compromise on that, not under ‘RTB’, or ‘Ross the boss’.
Twenty-two brothers come together every weekend and merge these values into a football cocktail. Our brand of football, as we say.
But Lyon is not the sole reason we are going to play in the last game of the season. He is but one very important part in the process of building a team worthy of playing in a grand final.
The deepest roots to the team that will represent us in the 2013 decider can be found two decades ago, when a young South Australian joined the club as the fourth pick in the National Draft.
Matthew Pavlich was his name, now the greatest player in our history and the man who will lead our charge to greatness on the hallowed turf next Saturday.
‘Pav’ brought so much more than his undoubted playing ability to Fremantle – he brought his values.
Passion, pride, family and, perhaps most crucially, absolute professionalism.
Meticulous in every aspect of his life, ‘Pav’ set a benchmark for preparation that other players aspired to emulate.
He gave us some respect in the football world. His leadership has been imperative to forming the foundation on which our grandfinal team will be built, but he couldn’t have done it alone.
Pavlich will play forward on Saturday, but at the other end of the ground is another battle-scarred warrior of our club.
Luke McPharlin’s arrival to Fremantle was shrouded in controversy, considering what we gave up to get him here.
The club dealt our number 1, 18 and 36 picks to Hawthorn to get McPharlin and Trent Croad to the club.
The Hawks selected premiership heroes Luke Hodge and Sam Mitchell with the first and last of those picks.
Yes, Hawthorn drafted well, but we got a champion player and person, and the man who will most likely stand Hawks’ superstar Lance ‘Buddy’ Franklin on Saturday.
If full back and full forward are the key posts at either end, it’s the ruckman who will complete the backbone of our grand final team.
Boy did we get a good one onto our rookie list in 2001.
Aaron Sandilands is a champion of the game, and if we are to emerge triumphant at the ‘G’, ‘Spider’ will have undoubtedly played a huge role.
His monstering of Geelong in the qualifying final served as a reminder to all who doubted him. You know who you are.
In 2002, we traded aggressively for young West Australian and newly crowned Brisbane Lions’ premiership player Des Headland.
To get the deal done, Freo gave Adam McPhee to Essendon, who in turn gave us pick 55 and sent Blake Caracella to Brisbane.
The only man still running around from that three-way trade is pick 55.
Ryan Crowley – the AFL’s elite tagger – almost never made it. He was delisted and then given another chance on the rookie list.
While he always showed the ability to negate the best midfielders, it wasn’t until Lyon arrived that we had someone to call ‘The Glove’.
The 2003 draft period would prove quite fruitful. It gave us two pieces of our current defence – Michael Johnson and Paul Duffield – and a future Doig Medallist in David Mundy.
Like Sandilands, Duffield was selected in the rookie draft – a pool Freo would dip its hands into again in the coming years.
Garrick Ibbotson joined us for the 2006 season – a year that saw the club shock the football world by going all the way to a preliminary final.
We were close, or so we thought. Reality hit in 2007 when Freo, fancied by many to go one better, fell to 11th place.
Following a disappointing season, forwards Chris Mayne and Kepler Bradley were added via the National Draft.
A new direction was needed, and so, in a list model strategy meeting in 2008, headed by new CEO Steve Rosich, list development manager Chris Bond and recruiting boss Brad Lloyd, it was decided that youth was the way to go.
The club would keep its early draft picks and take ‘free swings’ at uncontracted players in the pre-season drafts.
If Pavlich, McPharlin and Sandilands form the foundation upon which our current team is built, it was in the 2008 draft that most of the bricks were laid.
Via the National Draft we gained Stephen Hill, Hayden Ballantyne, Nick Suban, Zac Clarke and Michael Walters. We then landed Matt de Boer and Clancee Pearce in the rookie draft.
One year later, the luckless Anthony Morabito was taken with the fourth pick in the National Draft, but it’s the next selection that may potentially go down as the best we’ve ever made, value-wise.
A young man who’d dominated the WAFL colts grand final for Claremont slipped to pick 20, and we pounced.
Nat Fyfe made a strong start to his career in 2010, but it was in 2011 that he sprouted his first wings and set flight towards stardom.
Incredibly strong in the ground contests and brilliant in the air, the lad from Lake Grace has the tools to be a champion, and he may just write his first chapter of greatness at the MCG on Saturday.
While the club chose smartly in the national drafts in 2008 and 2009, our recruiters had also identified another avenue by which we could gain an advantage on our opposition – mature-age players.
Michael Barlow and Alex Silvagni were picked up from football’s ‘unwanted list’ at the end of 2009.
Well into their 20s when selected in the rookie draft, the pair had gone unnoticed in the ‘main’ drafts since they were 18.
Tendai Mzungu pulled on the boots at the age of 24 after the club picked him up in the 2010 draft, and a year later the club rookie listed defender Lee Spurr, who also debuted at 24.
Lachie Neale, Cam Sutcliffe and Tom Sheridan, who all played in the qualifying final win over Geelong this year, were taken in the 2011 National Draft, as was quality ruckman Jon Griffin, who was snapped up fromAdelaide.
At the end of an injury-ravaged 2011 season, the club had almost all the pieces in place.
We possessed a good mix of experienced leaders and a host of young players, who were under the tutelage of our development academy, headed by Simon Lloyd.
What we needed was someone to put the puzzle together.
Ross Lyon’s arrival came amidst a firestorm of criticism, initially from the media when the club unveiled our new coach at a press conference in September, 2011.
In a precursor to what his new players could expect, Ross stood his ground, resolute, regardless of what was thrown at him.
Soon after he’d landed at Freo, Lyon brought the often wrongly maligned Zac Dawson from St Kilda, who we got after landing one of our ‘free swings’ in the pre-season draft.
It seemed everyone in the football world didn’t think Dawson was good enough, except Lyon, who saw him as a reliable, if unfashionable, defender, one who knew his game plan and could impart it to teammates.
And an intricate game plan it was. Freo struggled to implement it early on, suffering some ugly defeats in the first few months of Lyon’s reign.
“Horror show” they called it in The West. “Unwatchable” said football legend Kevin Bartlett.
Footy commentator Mark Maclure accused the Freo coach of destroying the game and said Lyon had “confused and bewildered” the players with his game plan.
But Lyon never wavered. He kept feeding us terms such as resilient and uncompromising. Keep giving great effort and it would come together, he said.
Many weren’t convinced, but the only ones Lyon had to win over, were. The players bought in.
We made the finals last year and gave an almighty effort, falling short in the second week.
Lyon had not only resurrected our hopes, he’d given life to flat-lining football careers, too, such as Walters’ and Clancee Pearce’s.
Another Pearce, Danyle from Port Adelaide, was added to the team for the 2013 season. He gave us another outside midfielder to compliment Hill.
And so, the list from which Saturday’s 22 will be picked to represent us in the AFL Grand Final was built.
What will it take to claim football’s Holy Grail, the Premiership Cup? Some might say luck.
Lyon has taught us that luck is what’s left once you’ve worked your hardest.
If that is the case, then luck is what it could take to beat Hawthorn, because every Fremantle fan now knows that all 22 players representing our club this Saturday will work their absolute hardest.
Lyon knows all too well what part luck can play in the AFL’s decider. He, and Dawson, were denied the ultimate success at St Kilda by the fateful bounce of the ball, twice.
At his first Freo media conference, after the initial barrage of questions, Lyon was asked what he thought the potential of his new squad was.
“It’s all about possibility,” he told reporters.
“You can be what you want to be. That’s my whole philosophy.
“Once you decide what you want to be, you’ve got to bring that to life by getting into work.
“Every moment of the day you’ve got to pursue excellence. You’re either getting closer to your goal or you’re getting further away.
“If you don’t prepare every moment of the day in that manner, you’re getting further away from your goal.”
Right now, we’re close, very close.
Freo, one to go.
