In the Fremantle Dockers’ 25th year, club physiotherapist Dr Jeffrey Boyle takes us back through the club’s history with the podcast ‘Bleeding Purple’. 

Episode two features Fremantle’s inaugural senior coach Gerard Neesham.

Boyle has worked for Fremantle since 1 November 1994 and has been involved in every single one of Fremantle’s 547 games to date.

When Fremantle ran out for their debut AFL season in 1995, they did so with a game plan that was described as ‘ahead of its time’ by AFL great Dennis Pagan.

Freo’s ‘chip and carry’ style is said to have heavily influenced a number of current AFL coaches and was a pioneer of modern-day AFL tactics.

It was all the brainchild of inaugural senior coach Gerard Neesham, who used his experience as a water polo player to develop a similar game plan with Claremont. 

As a coach of Claremont, Neesham won four WAFL premierships in 1987, 1989, 1991 and 1993 before taking on the senior coaching role at Fremantle.

Speaking to Boyle on the Bleeding Purple podcast, Neesham said he had long wondered why the counter-attacking tactics he had seen in water polo and field hockey weren’t being used in the AFL. 

“I just happened to play a lot of team sport, whether it was water polo or hockey or basketball, and there were a lot of things happening in those sports that was not happening in Aussie Rules,” Neesham said.

“When I got the chance in 1986 to (coach Claremont)…it was obvious that there were lots of ingredients (from other sports) involving taking possession in the backline.”

Neesham said a conversation with legendary Australian hockey player and coach Ric Charlesworth helped him form the idea of adopting a similar game plan for Australian rules football.

He said that traditionally, backmen were instructed to spoil over the perceived riskier play of contesting the mark.

After talking to Charlesworth, Neesham felt this was an extremely conservative approach, especially when the impact of conceding a goal is a lot lower in football compared to lower-scoring sports.

“I was lucky that I worked at Challenge Stadium for about eight years, so I had access to all of the Olympians,” Neesham said.

“We spoke about sport and all aspects of it. You’d speak to Ric Charlesworth and he’d talk about the fact that they’d been 0-0 in an Olympic Gold Medal playoff and if the ball was hit into their defence, they would trap it, take control and counter-attack”

“The amount of pressure of that situation (at 0-0), compared to a footballer taking a mark in the backline, where there’s probably 15 goals a game, it was just illogical not to take marks if you could take them.” 

Neesham said that Fremantle’s playing style was initially criticised in the media but he felt that it helped Freo punch above their weight in their inaugural year – winning eight games with a percentage of 92.85.

“When one of our blokes went for a mark, it might have been ‘Paddy’ (Stephen) O’Reilly and maybe ‘Plugga’ (Tony Lockett) marked it,” Neesham said.

“Then I get cooked by the media and saying ‘you should spoil’ – because it was all brand new, and of course you’d make mistakes occasionally.

“But taking possessions, changing direction, counter-attacking and carrying the ball – they’re things that were standard for me from other sports. I brought it to Claremont first and endeavoured to bring it into the AFL as a benefit to our club, not as some gimmick. 

“Our results, bluntly, for the quality of the players we had, were pretty good as we were actually pretty hard to play against.”

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