Justin Longmuir stood on the margins of the mayhem in Fremantle’s rooms last Friday night. His Dockers had mown down a willing but truncated Sydney side and Longmuir stood slouched, relieved, knackered. Some people walk into a room and automatically command it. Footy is full of people like that. Some are teachers. Some are generals who never found a war. Some, as Neale Daniher always said, are actors – projecting hope to the players and stability to the critics. Most of them are a bit mad.
Longmuir has always been something of an outlier – a classic introvert who can come across as nervous and awkward in press conferences, a man who had to steel himself to speak to large groups when he started coaching. He’s not a coach who picks fights or creates diversions or speaks in riddles. He says he’s an over-thinker. He says he’s harder on himself than any critic, and there has been plenty of those. As one of just two senior coaches who have never played in or coached a grand final team, it’s something that can make him an easy target when the side are underperforming – that he doesn’t have the playing record, the aura, the eloquence, the polish, the prick in him.
On Friday night at the SCG, Longmuir was content to sit back and let his Dockers players bask in their come-from-behind preliminary final win. They’re a funny mix of pedigrees and rescue dogs. There’s the big dork of a Texan, Mason Cox, the prancing pony, Patrick Voss, the captain with the artfully tousled hair, Alex Pearce. Some of their hardest working players, like Andrew Brayshaw and Caleb Serong, had all the favours in their junior careers. Brayshaw captained a school team that ended up having a dozen players drafted. Serong went to a school that had equestrian stables and cross-country skiing tournaments. Both play like they’re still on footy’s breadline.
So many of their teammates could easily have fallen through football’s cracks. So many of them were overlooked in draft after draft. So many of them were plucked from second- and third-tier competitions. So many of them were identified, nurtured, and put in the best possible position to succeed. A lot of the credit goes to David Walls, his gimlet eye and his list management strategy. But right from the beginning, Longmuir himself was renowned for his ability to spot a diamond in the rough, and to back in players most others had given up on.
“I’m a process kind of guy,” Longmuir said when he was first hired as Fremantle head coach. He mentions the word “process” pretty much every time he speaks. It doesn’t exactly make for electrifying copy. But it’s his anchor when they’re five goals down in a preliminary final. It’s what he talks about when they’re steamrolling teams in Perth and everyone’s declaring them sure things. And it’s what he spoke about when they were at their lowest ebb last year, a ghastly 61-point loss to St Kilda at Marvel Stadium.
“Process” is a way of treating triumph and disaster as the impostors they are. But it’s also an indication that the club believe in what they’re doing. This list has been carefully constructed, all with an eye towards their first premiership. They’ve done it without father-son picks, academy selections or free agents. Not only have they excelled at the lower reaches of the draft pool, but they have a great eye for top-end talent. The two most significant figures in Friday night’s win – Hayden Young and Serong – were taken at picks seven and eight of the 2019 draft, a month after Longmuir was appointed. The two players selected before them were Dylan Stephens and Fischer McAsey.
The “process” works in a meeting room, in a three quarter-time huddle, and in a list management discussion. It’s an essential way of narrowing the focus. After all, coaching is no place for dreamers. As José Mourinho once sneered, poets don’t win titles. But the bigger Fremantle story is anything but procedural. The bigger Fremantle story is one of class, of loss, of gallows humour, of 30 years as the noisy neighbour, as the lovable loser. Every now and then, the coach and his players will reference it. They’ll talk about becoming Fremantle immortals. And then they’ll check themselves. If they spent too much energy on it, they’d be in straitjackets, and Brisbane would trample all over them.
In breaking their premiership ducks and droughts, Mark Williams, Paul Roos and Luke Beveridge all referenced the history of their clubs, whether it was on the stage or in the rooms afterwards. It’s hard to imagine Longmuir doing a mock hanging with his neck tie, berating the chief sponsor from the dais, or growling “HERE IT IS!” into the microphone. But one can never be sure. Until 5.30pm on Saturday, he has to be more chess master than cloud dweller. He has to worry about taking down one of the greatest teams of all time, rather than concerning himself with the psychological state of his supporters. But beyond the process he knows there’s a much bigger picture, a reminder that in sport, as in life, the weight of history often falls upon the most unremarkable of people.
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