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One team plays at Adelaide Oval, a magnificent modern stadium widely acknowledged as the best footy venue in the nation. The other plays at Patersons Stadium, a decrepit hellhole with an atmosphere as suburban as its name.
Because surely at some level Freo’s players don't want to sing that horrible club song, any more than the rest of us want to hear it. It sounds like it was written by some cheesy '70s stadium rock band which spent too long watching old Popeye cartoons. Port, on the other hand, has the stirring refrain of The Power To Win. And if that leaves you cold, there's Never Tear Us Apart, a rolled-gold Aussie classic, as an unofficial backup.
Freo might pretend to be a big, burly team of Dockers ... but they showed their true colours when they chose to drape themselves in purple. That's right, purple. The colour of Royalty. And Roman Catholic Bishops. And the artist formerly - and then subsequently - known as Prince. Yeah, real tough.
Deep down, we reckon the Gods of Football know there is nothing quite as funny as a Ross Lyon press conference when the Dockers lose. The volcanic Lyon even (allegedly) grabbed one of his own fans by the throat a week ago. Contrast that with Port’s Ken Hinkley, a man who knows how to stay cool in a crisis.
Love him or hate him, everyone knows who David Koch is. As club president, he's given Port Adelaide a national profile. Whereas Fremantle's president is an advertising executive called Steve Harris. Nope, us neither.
Port fans love to make life hard for players who bolted from Alberton. Having put Troy Chaplin in his place they are preparing to make Danyle Pearce regret his free-agency defection to Fremantle. Dockers fans are passionate but they don’t have much ammo to sledge specific Port players.
Port has a prison bar heritage jumper ... Fremantle just has prison bars. Literally. Their biggest tourist attraction is a massive jail. Whereas Port Adelaide has dolphins. And who doesn’t like dolphins?
Speaking of convicts, WA was founded with them. We weren't. They've got "free" as a syllable in their name, but it's woven into the very fabric of our state.
Australia II's triumph in the America's Cup at Newport, Rhode Island, in 1983 is seared into our national consciousness. That fabulous moment when Australia finally upstaged the Yanks, and the PM gave every Aussie worker permission to pull a sickie. And then in 1987 we tried to defend the Cup in Fremantle and lost 4-0. Thanks, Fremantle.
Your turn to buy a round of craft beers at a Fremantle pub? Better remortgage the house – you can blame their exorbitant prices on a combination of the mining boom and an invasion of yuppies who think a Docker is someone plugging an iPhone into a Bose speaker. Give us a refreshing Coopers at a Port pub any day - reasonably priced and as cloudy as Lyon’s future as a top-flight coach.
