by Drubbing

Steve Harris & Steve Rosich

Fremantle Football Club

Dear Steve and Steve

I'll get right to it. The jumper. A bad idea. In the history of bad ideas, this one ranks up there with Vegemite 2.0, cheese in a can, cauliflower ice cream, Damian Drum, and the powder blue safari suit. It's dangerously on par with changing your name to a brand of cat food for a day for a quick buck.

I use humour to deflect my indignation that such a decision is based on…well, I don't know what exactly, as there doesn't seem to be any image thing down at Freo that needs fixing. Except, I'm sorry to say, the idea you think something does.

I know I'm no advertising guru or CEO material, but I have been in marketing myself for 20 years, and what I have learnt from that is you need to know your market. You need to know the customers in it, and what they think. And you should listen to them before making large decisions that affect them. You can ramp that factor up exponentially when you're talking about something as irrational and emotional as football.

It seems you've looked at the market from the angle of what's missing from it, and I can only assume the dormant membership/merchandise possibilities of purple + chevrons must be of Apple-sized proportions. I can't speak for other members, but I have no reason to doubt you've had a lot of mail on this one. Of course it will be largely negative. People don't get fired up over things they don't care about.

It's the jumper that McManus, Parker, Bell, Longmuir, Farmer, Cook, Haselby, Kickett, Dhurrkay,  and - lord help us, we can't ignore it - Clive played in. Yes, the traditional jumper's been tweaked, and the all-purple and white away strip added. But the elements that tie it together remained. The anchor is one such element. I think it's disrespectful to the players and admin that have gone before them, to dump such a symbol.

I've been a member for 10 years and a supporter since '94. I've seen Freo struggle for virtually all of those years wearing the colours and symbols it was created with. Freo had one of the poorest start-up squads in the comp, and made a lot of its own bad luck along the way. Work experience umpires and sirens have provided almost constant moments of high farce. But that's its history. The jumper goes along with that. It’s part of the baggage that provides a link to its actual history – not one made up to go with it.

Such a change is not providing a connection to 'tradition'; to me, it's shoehorning a history onto something because you feel it doesn't have any of its own worth representing. The crowd at Freo's losing 2003 final against Essendon would loudly disagree. Were you blokes there?

Freo has not struggled financially since Schwab got things on track. Victorian clubs would sell their coaches grandmother's to pokie slavedom for the paid up membership Freo has, and the sorts of sponsors it's attracted. The only thing lacking was making a dent on the competition. Given the talent on display this year, it's clear Freo now also has the potential to be a force on the field as well. It makes such a decision all the more bewildering. Dumb even.

While branding is an inevitable part of sports business these days, you already have that. As one media pundit said recently, it’s about the only thing Freo have got consistently right in its short history.

I'm sadly reminded of that world-class arseclown, Robert Walls, when he cornered Mark Harvey on TV last year and pointedly asked, "what does Freo stand for?" Harvey was caught off guard, and struggled to answer such a loaded and puerile question.

This decision seems to provide Walls' media-moment cheap shot with unnecessary weight and relevance.