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Sport Nation
Duff: An ode to Michael Walters
Mark Duffield • July 7th, 2025 8:00 pm
I want to pay tribute to Michael Walters – the brilliant Dockers small forward who called time on his AFL career last week after 239 games, an All-Australian blazer in 2019 and countless big time acts in big time moments in games that will endear him to Freo fans forever.
He sits inside the top half dozen Fremantle players in club history – Behind Matthew Pavlich and Nathan Fyfe and perhaps behind Aaron Sandilands Luke McPharlin and David Mundy – he is ahead of all others though and he will go out as one of the club’s most loved players.
His retirement means that Nathan Fyfe is the sole survivor from Fremantle’s 2013 grand final team and of course Fyfe faces his own battle making it back from his latest soft tissue setback.
But it won’t be 2013 I will remember Walters most fondly for – it will be 2019 when he played as a forward/midfielder and added 40 goals to 21 disposals a game to earn his All-Australian blazer.
Fyfe won his second Brownlow that year but it was a time when many of the league’s top midfielders were starting to be judged by the ability to get forward and hit the scoreboard.
Walters efforts put him in the company of superstars like Dusty Martin who kicked 37 in a similar role in 2017 and Paddy Dangerfield who managed 45 for the Cats – also in 2017.
So he wasn’t just good, he was special – a diminutive player who could take a screamer out of the sky or turn nothing into a goal off the ground.
He would come up big in big moments for the Dockers. Remember those back to back weeks in 2019 when he hit the post after the siren to win the game against Brisbane here at Optus Stadium by a point? Then he followed it the following week with the match winner against Collingwood at the MCG.
In that dream I have as a Dockers man where the team trails by four points when the siren goes and someone has the ball in their hands within range to win the game – I always want that kick taken by Michael Walters – the bloke I would trust with my life in front of goals with a set shot.
As Walters said in his press conference – everyone is just passing through. But a part of me is very sad that he has passed through without another chance to take that kick.
