In defence of Freo's 2021 draft class

2021 was a weird draft class. Not quite as unknowable as the spin-around-blindfolded-and-pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey 2020 draft, but still compromised by Covid-19 travel restrictions. Freo haven’t hesitated to draft interstate (particularly country Victorians: Serong, Young, Treacy, Darcy, to name a few) yet in 2021—perhaps due to the aforementioned travel restrictions interrupting scouting—Freo eyed off only hometown heroes. Freo were not missing out on drafting yet another West Australian KPF, and swooped on Jye Amiss. Neil Erasmus came next (in retrospect, earning the unhappy distinction of being taken one pick ahead of Nasiah Wanganeen-Milera). Freo fans could not believe their luck when their other first round prospect slipped past all other first round pick holders, including West Coast—at the very top of the 2021 2nd round, Freo selected Matthew Johnson.

2021 produced some superstars of the game: Nick Daicos, Sam Darcy, Jason Horne-Francis, and the best of the bunch in Nasiah Wanganeen-Milera. All but NWM were ahead of Freo’s picks, and Daicos and Darcy were out of contention anyway due to esoteric “father/son” rules. There’s plenty of other quality too: Wilmot, Andrew, Rachele, Lohmann, Owens.

So, should Freo be lamenting its local drafting strategy in 2021? Well, it’s not that simple.

Jye Amiss is a 22 year old KPF who already has more than a hundred goals under his belt. Freo have been crying out for a post-Pav saviour—Taberner, Hogan, Lobb, even the deep cuts like Shane Kersten have arrived and ignominiously departed. Finally, a kid kicking goals! Happy days for the fanbase, right?

Wrong.

There is a vocal anti-Amiss contingent amongst Freo fans (and the footy media), who want more set shot accuracy, more mongrel, more crashing packs, and most of all more goals. This is compounded by the meteoric ascension of Josh Treacy to an old-fashioned clunk-and-convert power forward, and an outlandish SPP jag in Patrick Voss, who gets a lot of buzz for enthusiastic celebrations but deserves props for his work ethic as a ground-level contested beast. Freo have been playing a very tall forward line with all three KPFs (Amiss 196cms, Treacy 195cms, Voss 195cms) plus resting rucks, and this diffusion of targets means nobody is putting up astounding goal tallies like a one-man tall forward line of 2023 Larkey or 2024 Waterman.

But goals are being produced; as a long-suffering Freo fan, I can attest to the vanishing rarity of this functional tall forward structure.

What does Amiss need to do to silence the critics? Nailing the gimmes, the 30m-slight-angle goals would certainly help; after some lamentable goal-kicking in our history, these easy misses tend to form an outsized imprint upon the Freo supporter psyche. For all the media criticism, I don’t think there’s any danger of Jye running afoul of Freo’s selection committee—even on low disposal days, Amiss is doing impressive work behind the scenes in self-sacrificial running patterns that decongest the prime leading lanes at the top of the square, and getting up the ground to assist with team defence and outlet marks. Still, slight improvements in strength, especially in pack marking, would go a long way. The danger of such a tall forward line is any slower entries result in many hands to the same ball (especially if either ruck is resting forward), and strength overhead—such as Josh Treacy produced in 2024 and 2025—is essential for clean set shots instead of scrubby, low xScore crumbed snaps. Amiss only had 18 contested marks for the year, while Treacy had 44. But rewind to 2023, and Treacy had a paltry 15 contested marks from 17 games—at a certain shoulder strength and stability, those spilled marks start sticking. There has been a narrative that Amiss has “slimmed down” this pre-season. Intentional reduction of mass would be a very strange move for a 22 year old KPF; but from comparing photographs, it does not appear to be true.

Matthew Johnson is my pick for Freo’s “wow, where has this guy been hiding” of 2026, but I probably said the same thing in 2025. The fundamental question here: what is a Matthew Johnson? If you asked Johnno, he’d probably say a ball-winning inside midfielder who can break away with silky disposal. His compulsive focus on improving his contested game feels like a reaction to his own shock slip down the draft order, where his rangy frame and lack of raw power through scrums was noted as a drawback. And so, perhaps out of spite, Matthew Johnson the contested beast was born.

Now this is all very well, so long as we give the man inside midfield rotations. The problem is, we haven’t really; Matthew Johnson had 24% center bounce attendance in 2025, mostly playing as a skinny side winger. And this was without Hayden Young available the vast majority of 2025. This lack of rotations isn’t an indictment of Johnson’s capacity to win his own ball; rather, Freo have a veritable wealth of inside midfielders. Serong, Brayshaw, Young are all straight in, with Luke Jackson getting increasing non-ruck inside midfield rotations as the game’s tallest inside mid. Freo also like to rotate Bolton and Switkowski through the middle to make up for a lack of explosive pace and agility from our first choice mids. There is a paucity of remaining rotations for aspirant inside mids. If Johnson is shunted to the wing, then disposal (especially disposal i50) is everything—and Johnson’s kicking after winger-level kilometers covered hasn’t been all that convincing.

After all that time working on his contested game, the cruel irony is that Matthew Johnson needs to return to the kicking efficiency and incisive vision so prized back in his 2021 draft profile.

A lot of Neil Erasmus’s problems stem from the same lack of inside rotations available. Unlike Johnno, there was never any question about Erasmus’s inside game; the issue was what he did with the ball once he’d won it.

Whereas Amiss and Johnson are straight into the b22 when available, Erasmus has been the Michael Jordan of Peel Thunder. At WAFL-level, with a less sophisticated team defence and generally slower pace of play, Erasmus seems to dominate every contest, start every score chain. Towards the tail-end of the 2025 WAFL season, he was earning a dedicated tagger solely to neutralise his impact; the state league commentators sounded subtly filthy that Peel Thunder were getting such an undue advantage by fielding this clearly-AFL-standard midfielder.

On this outstanding WAFL form, Erasmus repeatedly earned a call-up… into the sub role. Neil Erasmus might as well have been built in a lab to be the worst possible sub: he needs around a quarter to readjust to AFL pacing and structure and play himself into the game; he has excellent 4 quarter endurance without the sort of blistering pace that can tear apart a game in the final quarter; he does not have the confidence to hit the risky passes you need to win from behind, and his tendency to overthink off the backline meant a lot of long down the line kicks to a halved contest which, in the final quarter, might cost Freo a close game.

In his last few games of 2025, Raz revealed a new weapon in his arsenal: the barely-disguised throw. The pendulum of unpunished throws has swung back to 2016 Bulldogs premiership levels, and finally a Freo player has noticed. Erasmus bravely lunges head-first through contests, go-go-gadget armspan slipping out some tiny gap in the tackle to mime a handball. This sort of throw is widespread in the comp due to being almost impossible to discern without the assistance of a slow motion replay. I do not envy umpires who are supposed to make these calls in real time.

Can you earn a spot in an AFL team by, well, cheating? If I were being uncharitable, I would say that Hawthorn’s forward line might hint at an answer.

This might seem a harsh assessment of our former first-rounder. Let me caveat that Erasmus has also vastly improved on quicker decision-making and field kicking in the later games of 2025. Towards the back-end of 2025, it seemed as if he was going to request a trade to the Bulldogs (I will allow the obvious to go unsaid here). Freo got lucky that the only team having a crack at Raz also had a plethora of inside midfielders, and was unlikely to guarantee him on-ball rotations.

More teams should have asked the question; Neil Erasmus is simply too good to get stuck in the WAFL.

I see these three as almost guaranteed to be b23 in 2026, thereby constituting the clearest avenue for team improvement. The most established of this group, Amiss, had a half-dozen really great games in 2025. These high impact games should be happening more often than not; all the pieces are there for Amiss to take a 2024-Treacy-esque step up. While there were a couple of standout games from Johnson or Erasmus, they felt precariously poised in the b23, among the last players selected, often in the bottom 6 performers. Unlike a lot of their fellow 2021 cohort, these two haven’t had the AFL minutes to flourish, due to injury and selection crunch. On standard linear improvement with games played, a big jump in output for Johnson or Erasmus (or both) seems statistically likely. They’ve looked bullied out of contests at times—tall mids can take longer to adjust to AFL physicality than those with Serong-like centers of gravity. And then there’s the improvements that inevitably come with reliable game time: familiarity with structures and teammates; a lack of second-guessing your decisions and skills. High-risk, high-reward plays are only possible without the Sword of Damocles of a WAFL return hovering over your every touch.

Judd McVee will help creative disposal out of our back half, and there’s some slim chance a draftee forces his way into the b23 as Murphy Reid did. But Freo’s line-up in 2026 is going to look a lot like our 2025; unlike the frantic off-season recruiting from other finals-focused sides, our improvement will be almost entirely internal. But vast individual improvement will be hard to eke out—in such a young side, almost all of our list is massively over-performing for their age.

Freo’s 2026 is in the hands of Jye Amiss, Neil Erasmus, and Matthew Johnson.