Fremantle's 11th straight win exposes Brisbane's third-quarter collapse

Fremantle arrived at the Gabba on Saturday with a plan, and Brisbane had no answer for it. The Dockers, already riding a ten-game winning streak, dismantled the reigning premiers 15.13 (103) to 10.18 (78)—a 25-point margin that felt far wider than the scoreline suggested. At one point, Fremantle led by 50 points, a chasm the Lions could never meaningfully close despite a late-game push that came too late to matter.

What made the performance remarkable was not just the winning margin but the way the Dockers constructed it. They didn't rely on a single dimension of play. Instead, they attacked Brisbane from everywhere: defensive 50, centre-bounce, the contest, the spread. In the second quarter alone, they kicked four consecutive goals. In the third, they kicked six to Brisbane's three, including a run of five straight majors that essentially ended the contest by the 14-minute mark. Luke Jackson's goal at the 12-minute mark of that third term put them up 40 points. Josh Treacy's second goal moments later made it 46. The Gabba crowd, which had come expecting a contest, watched in silence as their team was picked apart.

Adam Simpson, the West Coast coach who won a premiership, called Fremantle "the real deal" after the match. He wasn't being generous. The Dockers' early strategy exposed what has become Brisbane's defining weakness in 2026: the inability to defend transition. When Fremantle moved the ball from their defensive 50 to their forward 50, Brisbane simply couldn't stop them. In one passage that Simpson highlighted, it took the Dockers just six disposals in 21 seconds to go end-to-end, untouched, with the ball landing in Patrick Voss's hands for a set shot. "It's almost unacceptable," Simpson said. "No one touches that ball in the whole transition from fullback to full-forward."

Brisbane entered the match ranked 17th in the competition for defensive-50-to-score against—a damning statistic that Saturday's performance only reinforced. Alastair Lynch, a three-time Brisbane premiership player, watched from the boundary and saw a familiar pattern. "I'm seeing far too much of a similar pattern in these third quarters," he said. This was the second time in a fortnight the Lions had collapsed in the third term. A week earlier, they'd allowed GWS to post the best third quarter in history. Now they were doing it again, this time against the ladder-leaders. Lynch suggested the psychological toll of three consecutive grand finals might be playing a role, but he was clear: "They're getting bullied at the moment. It looks like first versus eighth."

The loss marked Brisbane's third straight defeat, a slide that has raised serious questions about whether the reigning premiers can sustain their challenge. They trailed by just 21 points at halftime, suggesting the game was still contested. But the third quarter exposed something deeper—a team that couldn't respond when the opposition turned up the pressure, a team that looked rattled. Simpson observed it plainly: "They've been rattled for a couple of weeks."

Injuries complicated matters for both sides. Keidean Coleman, Brisbane's 26-year-old defender who had played every game this season, suffered a hamstring injury in the first quarter and didn't return. He's now facing a spell on the sidelines after managing just two games in the past two years due to ACL and quad injuries. With Dayne Zorko already sidelined for at least another five weeks with a calf issue, Brisbane's back-half depth is stretched thin. Fremantle, meanwhile, lost key defender Brennan Cox to a knee injury in the second term. The 27-year-old was ruled out at the start of the third quarter, leaving both teams diminished heading into the coming weeks.

With 11 straight wins now in the bank, Fremantle has moved beyond the category of surprise packet. They are a legitimate flag favourite, and Saturday's performance—varied, relentless, and executed across multiple phases of play—suggested they have the depth and flexibility to sustain that status. For Brisbane, the question is whether they can arrest the slide before it becomes something irreversible.