If you weren’t aware of how blunt and ruthless the footy media can be in a two-team town, you got a glimpse of it on Tuesday morning.
In the wake of Fremantle’s subpar start to the 2023 season – two losses to St Kilda and North Melbourne when the club entered both matches as favourites to win – recruit Luke Jackson was the central figure on the back page of WA’s biggest newspaper, The West Australian.
The kicker headline read ‘NO ACTION JACKSON’, accompanied by the subheading: ‘Shocking statistic lays bare prized recruit’s HORROR start at Freo’. There was also a cheeky red price tag with the caption: ‘$78,000 PER MARK?’
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It all referred to the fact Jackson had taken just one mark from his first two games since being traded from Melbourne in October last year and reportedly signed a seven-year Dockers deal worth around $900,000 per season.
Predictably, the back page has attracted a lot of attention.
Jackson is 21 years old and stands at 199cm. He was taken by the Demons with Pick 3 in the 2019 draft, but most rucks and key-position players don’t hit their football prime until their mid-20s, let alone Round 3 of their fourth year on a list.
At the same time, most rucks and key-position players don’t win the Rising Star award and a premiership medallion in their first two years in the AFL system then 12 months later sign a multimillion-dollar deal with a rival club, which was prepared to part with two first-round picks and a second-round selection to acquire the player.
Then there’s the loftier expectations this year and general impatience surrounding Fremantle, which reached the semi-finals last year but still doesn’t have an AFL premiership cup in its trophy cabinet.
Oh and it’s the derby this weekend – only the biggest biannual AFL event in the west.
Hence Tuesday’s back page.
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Jackson, a couple of months after the bombshell 2022 trade, opened up to the same newspaper, saying he understood his lucrative contract was bound to attract some pressure, but added he was prepared to handle it all.
“I’m not a huge fan of all the attention. I don’t listen to that stuff. I focus on what I can control,” Jackson told The West Australian in December.
“For me, it’s about being happy and staying in the moment and I think that will help me out on the field.”
For Jackson – a laid-back kid from Southern River with ample talent and upside – “staying in the moment” is now clearly crucial this week.
North down dockers in one point thriller | 01:17
Ultimately, players are in a performance-based industry and, therefore, criticism is an inevitable part of the footy media cycle. Whether the criticism of Jackson on Tuesday was fair, however, remains a point of contention among pundits and fans.
Premiership Eagle Will Schofield told 6PR’s Wide World Of Sports he had “empathy” for all parties – Jackson, especially, and the reporter – but predominantly “anger” and “embarrassment” around the treatment of the Dockers ruck.
“I just think 21-year-old, played two games at a football club, he’s a ruckman – which puts him into a higher stratosphere of developing later – surely that’s too harsh to be coming at Luke Jackson?” Schofield told 6PR
“Fremantle have got way bigger issues than Sean Darcy and Luke Jackson in the ruck.
“It didn’t sit well with me.”
Schofield said if Jackson was still averaging 0.5 marks per game at the end of the season, “the back page probably deserves to be there”. But the ex-Eagles defender stressed the Dockers ultimately recruited Jackson “as a long-term prospect”, adding: “I’m assuming they weren’t recruiting him for Round 1 of 2023? They want him there for the next 10 or 12 years.”
That view was backed up by Freo coach Justin Longmuir on Tuesday night, who said Jackson would “continue to build on his game”.
“Luke’s two games into a long career at Freo, so we definitely didn’t get him to the club with a short-term vision,” Longmuir told 7 News Perth.
“Watching his game pretty closely, I think he’s creating a lot of opportunities for himself. He’s probably just not finishing his opportunities off.”
Still, Jackson will be a massive talking point for the rest of the 2023 season, particularly around his on-field chemistry with fellow ruck Sean Darcy.
Four-time Power best and fairest winner Kane Cornes said the early signs around Jackson and Darcy’s ability to work together weren’t promising, even suggesting Darcy should consider finding a new club at season’s end.
“Jackson and Darcy continue to get in each other’s road,” Cornes told Channel 9’s The Sunday Footy Show.
“The decision to go after another ruckman in the trade period, more so than a forward, is having costly implications for Fremantle right now.
Fremantle Press Conference | 11:55
“The amount of ball he (Jackson) is getting his hands to and dropping is a real concern.”
Dockers great Paul Hasleby claimed on SEN WA if Jackson wasn’t a big-name recruit, the Dockers “would drop Jackson and you would get Darcy back into form”.
Yet it’s only Round 2.
And as Matthew Pavlich – the Dockers’ greatest ever player – pointed out to foxfooty.com.au earlier this month, Longmuir is the ideal person to oversee and strike the ideal ruck-forward balance between Darcy and Jackson.
“My view is they can actually share it in-game and they don’t have to go off to the bench or be in a rotation. They can almost ‘slide’, if you like,” Pavlich told foxfooty.com.au
“For instance if there’s a stoppage, Darcy takes the ruck and Jackson plays as a high forward and they slide. Then Jackson becomes the ruck and there might be a couple of flips that confuses the opposition. It means you can balance it 50-50, 60-40.
“Remember Justin Longmuir is a former ruck-forward himself, so he’ll have some pretty good understanding of how that works. And obviously he’s worked alongside Aaron Sandilands, Dean Cox, Brodie Grundy, so he’ll know how to make that work.
“There’ll be times Jackson and Darcy won’t get as many minutes as they’d like in either position, but they’ll need to play a key role up forward by virtue of Matt Taberner and Nat Fyfe and Jye Amiss still needing to find that balance.”
For now, the pressure is on Jackson, Longmuir and the Dockers to deliver this Sunday, as making the finals from a 0-3 position is rare.
And if that win-loss record comes to fruition, Fremantle will have bigger problems than Jackson’s start to his Dockers journey.
