A three-way deal was cooked up involving Fremantle, Brisbane and Essendon. To compensate for Headland’s loss, the Lions received Blake Caracella from the Bombers, who in turn got Adam McPhee from Freo.
While Fremantle got their man in Headland, they were also given Essendon’s pick 55 in the upcoming National Draft.
With that selection, the club drafted a 17-year-old Victorian forward from the Calder Cannons named Ryan Morgan Crowley.
Headland became a key player at Freo. Caracella won a premiership at the Lions in 2003, and McPhee was crowned an All Australian with Essendon in 2004.
By comparison, Crowley’s first two seasons at Freo were underwhelming. He struggled to even break into Subiaco’s WAFL league team, let alone challenge for an AFL debut.
Crowley’s best friend at the club, fellow draftee Byron Schammer, was playing AFL football, which made it even harder.
“You really struggle to form those friendships and bond with the teammates when you’re so far away from the senior team, you’re not travelling with them and there’s no family over here,” Crowley says.
“You can become a bit homesick.”
He was subsequently delisted at the end of 2004, a day he’s never forgotten.
“I still remember that day like it was yesterday, the day I got told my footy dream and aspirations were done,” Crowley says.
“I don’t really remember driving home, there was that much going through my mind.
“By the time I had got home, I didn’t even remember how I got there.”
But Crowley was given another chance to pursue his dream via the rookie list that same year.
Ahead of a round 10 visit to Kardinia Park in 2005, then-senior coach Chris Connolly approached him at training.
“He came up to me and told me I’d been elevated from the rookie list,” Crowley says.
“By the end of training, when he turned the team board around and my magnet was on the board, I nearly fell off my chair.
“It was an exciting time, a boyhood dream.”
Crowley is now the scourge of the AFL’s elite midfielders, but no one is drafted as a tagger.
He was an attack-minded midfielder, or, as his under 18s’ coach used to joke, a ‘wing/ full-forward’.
In 2005, Freo needed someone to fill a new role for the team – that of the tagger.
Crowley’s best attribute was his tank, a prerequisite for running all day with the league’s best midfielders.
“Chris Connolly came up to me and told me there was a role for someone who wanted to take it on for the team,” Crowley says.
“I knew I had the tank to do it and I thought it was my ticket into the team.”
Crowley’s first tagging job was on Carlton star Nick Stevens at the MCG in round 16, 2005. He held the Blue to just 13 disposals.
“Stupidly, I went ok... it evolved from there,” he laughs.
Being a new face on the AFL scene, Crowley had to cop a few sledges from opponents trying to put him off his game.
“Guys would turn around and say things like ‘who’s this guy playing on me’, and ‘I don’t even know his name, get me the footy Record’,”
Crowley says. His father, Larry, saw the lighter side of his son’s new role. “One day, when I was younger, he sat me down and taught me about the defensive side of things, and I told him ‘Dad, I won’t have to worry about that sort of thing’,” Crowley says.
“He thought it was pretty funny that, all of a sudden, I’m tagging for a living.” There were some important lessons in the early days. Crowley recalls being touched up by then Port Adelaide star Shaun Burgoyne.
“He really tore me apart one day, but they are the games you really set yourself for the next time you play them,” he says.
“I remember the next time we played them I was ready to go.
“As soon as the game had finished the week before, I knew he was coming, and I had set myself to have a good crack at him. “The things he had taught me the last time I played against him, I tried to implement that, and I seemed to go ok.”
That competitiveness and sheer disdain of defeat is the other requirement to playing negator.
Crowley considers it personal when he’s beaten and says only current teammate Nick Suban might have more ‘white line fever’ at Freo.
That on-field persona is a far cry from the always-smiling, fine-dining critic-wannabe who often has viewers in stitches with his antics on ‘The Freo Newsroom’, a Docker TV show he hosts with teammate Garrick Ibbotson.
“It’s just the way that I am, and I think that’s why people find it strange when they meet me off the field, that I’m not really like that away from footy,” he says.
“I want to win and I want to go well and I want the team to go well, that’s my trade, so I do take it personally.”
Crowley is entrenched in the Fremantle line-up nowadays, but that wasn’t always the case. There was a time, even after he’d found his niche as a tagger, when he never felt he belonged in the big time.
That was until fate threw him a question he had to answer in front of an AFL nation.
The stage was the 2006 Preliminary Final against Sydney at ANZ Stadium.
The team’s number one tagger, Matthew Carr, who had the vital role on Swans’ superstar Adam Goodes, went down early with a knee injury.
With his club one win away from a maiden grand final appearance, Crowley was called up to perform arguably the most important role in the game.
He held Goodes to 20 disposals, but the experienced Sydney side still emerged victorious.
“Playing on a two-time Brownlow Medallist in a preliminary final, trying to get into a grand final, at the time I was only 20 or 21, I felt like a did a really good job,” he says.
“That was probably the time when I felt, if I could doit on the big stage in that sort of a game, then
I could do it in the home and away season.”
Crowley played his 150th game for Fremantle in round 12, 2013, against Brisbane at Patersons Stadium, leaving him eligible for life membership at the club.
Under Ross Lyon, he has fine- tuned his role to the point where many opponents, such as Richmond captain Trent Cotchin, now rate him the best tagger in the business.
On a recent episode of Fox Footy’s Open Mike, 1990 Brownlow Medallist Tony Liberatore praised Crowley, calling him a “wonderful player and a character of the game”. Recognition from a man considered a pioneer and one of the greatest at his art left Crowley ‘chuffed’.
“He is a champion of the game, and in terms of tagging and what I do, he is the one, he was one of the first and one of the best,” he says.
“It was nice to hear.”
But with the good comes the bad. From the game’s best player, Gary Ablett, who tweeted his thoughts in 2012, to the opposition cheer squads that give him a weekly serve during on-ground warm-ups.
But Crowley is unhindered by the tags that have been applied to him, seeing them as a sign of respect, rather than contempt.
“I find the better I’m going with my job, the more it comes,” he says.
The same can’t be said for his grandmother.
“When she’s sitting in the crowd, she still hasn’t got used to hearing all the heckling.”
Something that did bother Crowley to the core was the pinching allegation from North Melbourne great Brent Harvey in round 13 this season.
Rather than cop the fine, Crowley unsuccessfully challenged the AFL Match Review Panel’s hit to the hip-pocket. Not to save the money, but to clear his name.
“I didn’t want to be painted in that picture,” he says.
“I just knew if I went there and was honest, hopefully the truth would come out. I stand by defending myself, and that’s just how it is.”
Crowley is still homesick... when he leaves WA.
A place that had put him through some of the toughest times in his life now means everything to him.
“When I came over here I thought, as soon I finish playing football, I’ll go back home,” he says.
“The longer that I’ve stayed here, the more I’ve realised that it is my home now, I love it here.”
He hopes that, after the unimpressive start to his career, he has managed to repay the faith shown to him by the club.
“When you feel the way you do about a football club, and you have feelings and bonds with the people here, it’s good to know that you won’t be forgotten when you walk out the door,” Crowley says.
No one needs the footy Record anymore to know who pick 55 is.
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