Prelim Final Review | Craig O'Donoghue, The West Australian (21.09.2026)

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Mark Duffield (1:06)

It is time for a bit of CAD on Mornings with Mark Duffield on SEMWA. The West Australian's Craig O'Donoghue was at the SCG on Friday night. Of course, he is also a former Waffle umpire and a former Waffle umpire's coach. So a person well placed to talk about some of the controversies that happened over the weekend. Codd, welcome.

Morning Duffield.

Craig O'Donoghue (1:29)

It was a crazy, crazy, crazy weekend before you, wasn't it?

Mark Duffield (1:32)

It was crazy. And now I know this because I've lived what you went through on Friday night. It's a Friday night deadline, which is always really tight up against the final siren of the match. You have to basically by necessity do a lot of your match report as the match is unfolding. How much of your match report did you have to rewrite at the end of the game?

Craig O'Donoghue (1:56)

I had a thousand words written at three quarter time saying they had lost, and then Hayden Young hit the goal, and I thought, uh-oh, this is actually my chance to turn around fairly quickly if I get the first goal in the last. And when Shea Bolton kicked the first one, I went, oh, nothing got written makes sense.

Mark Duffield (2:13)

So, I know you're a quick typist. How soon did you file after the final siren?

Craig O'Donoghue (2:20)

We had about, we had less than five minutes after the siren to be in the lift, going back down to go down to the change room to speak to players and things. So, yeah, you do wake up the next day and go, I hope everything I wrote makes sense.

Mark Duffield (2:33)

And hopefully there's a good sub editor at the other end to make some sense of it in case it doesn't. So, where did the game change for you on Friday night?

Craig O'Donoghue (2:44)

Well, Freemantle took the game on. That was the biggest thing I thought. For the first three quarters, they were so slow with their ball movement. And Sydney just pushed numbers back into their back line. And we're taking the intercept mark after intercept mark. And basically daring Freemantle to kick the ball wide. And Freemantle said, well, we can't mark the ball in the corridor, so we'll go wide. And then they couldn't get shots that they could actually divert when they got wide. And Sydney did the exact opposite. They went into the corridor and put pressure on the Freemantle back line and kicked goals quite easily. So once the Dockers took on the corridor with speed, the game just totally changed and they were able to overpower Sydney. And they weren't under as much pressure when they were doing that compared to the slow play when they were just getting tackled all the time and handballing backwards and getting into stride. So yeah, I think the lesson there is very clear. You got to throw the first punch to win a grand final, and you can't be waiting until late to take it on. So they've got to take it on this week.

Mark Duffield (3:41)

The move of Shea Bolton to attack as well, they hadn't been able to get much out of their tall forwards. Tommy McCartan did a great job on Josh Tracy and Patty Voss and Jay Amis just had a couple of moments basically between them. So Shea Bolton to full forward gave them a completely different look and he had a massive impact.

Craig O'Donoghue (4:01)

Yeah, it meant they were kicking the ball lower when they were going inside 50 rather than just bombing in high and allowing McCartan and all these other key defenders to take Mark after Mark.

And it gave everyone the confidence they could win a little bit differently. Like they didn't have any crummers at ground level who were doing anything significant because the ball was getting marked all the time by the Twans. That last goal that Isaiah Dutley kicked was a classic example of ball being on the ground. Finally, Kampas comes out to him and away they go. So, yeah, that their crummers were able to get involved and having Shay Bolton as an extra small down there really helped. They had four talls at different points as well. Luke Jackson was down there with Amos and Voss and Tracy. So I think they need to really assess whether that's going to work on the MCJ on Grand Final day or not. Just go a little bit smaller and maybe only have the two talls inside and the other one pushing up the ground a little bit more at times.