Swans’ roller coaster month ends with heartbreak after Fremantle fightback

The Sydney Swans have put their supporters through a vast range of emotions within the past month. On Friday night, they served up a new one: heartbreak. Classic, traditional sporting trauma.

It turns out you don’t need to be at Optus Stadium to experience Wharfie Time. It doesn’t have to be a Fremantle home game for the purple haze to suddenly descend and dull the senses. It can happen anywhere, to anyone.

Fears that the Swans had “played their grand final” a fortnight ago were totally unfounded. From the outset of this classic preliminary final on Friday night, the Swans were rabid, aggressive, relentless, playing like their lives depended on it. Again. If their first effort didn’t stick, there was a second, third, fourth, fifth to follow. They knew where they wanted to go and wanted to get there in a hurry.

Whatever concoction sustained them in that qualifying final against the Brisbane Lions, there was more of it left … until, at some point in the final quarter, the punchbowl was empty.

For three quarters, the Dockers were nowhere near it. Everyone knew they were the better side considering Sydney’s long list of absentees, but the Swans played like the better side, and that’s all that matters in September. Yet they had left the door ever so slightly ajar for the Dockers, hitting the post four times and letting a number of other key opportunities slip.

Hayden Young’s goal for Fremantle on the three-quarter-time siren reduced Sydney’s margin to a manageable 21 points and restored in themselves a modicum of belief.

So who pushed the Wharfie Time button? You can take your pick, but it may well have been Patrick Voss, aka the ‘Prancing Pony’, who had hitherto been playing like a donkey. His only possession for the entire first half was a set shot after the half-time siren which did not even make the distance.

But then he produced a fend to remember; a nuclear don’t argue on Dane Rampe in the pocket in front of the Brewongle Stand at the SCG, before slotting a checkside kick through the big sticks and running away in glorious celebration. That was goal number three of what proved to be a match-winning, unanswered six-goal burst, reducing the margin to just nine points while also delivering a killer symbolic blow to the Swans, given the victim was Rampe, their inspirational defender and stand-in captain. If he chooses not to play on in 2027, that could be one of his final acts in a Sydney guernsey.

The Swans tried to hold on throughout the 10-minute arm wrestle that followed Voss’ goal, but they were cooked, and they knew it. Goals from Shai Bolton, Mason Cox and Isaiah Dudley finished them off, and the pain was etched all over the faces and bodies of Sydney’s players when the final siren eventually sounded and put them all out of their misery.

So the ride ends here.