The derby had arrived at a bad time in the season for Fremantle. Coming off a month where they'd played and beaten the worst of the worst, they were ready for a challenge. Like tigers who'd been trapped in a cage for a month...well not tigers, they would have just taken sleeping tablets to pass the time then "shown up late to training". Like demons waiting at the gates of hell...well not like demons, they'd deliberately lay down and call it “experimenting with players in different positions”.  Like Eagles...lets not even go there. 

The point was that they were geed up and ready for a fair dinkum contest to get themselves ready for the heat of finals footy. Unfortunately all they had to work with was a game against the West Coast - a derby, as the West Coast types liked to call it - or 'a light training run' if you hailed from Fremantle way. 

But, as Fremantle have often lamented when they've been forced to fly from Tasmania to Queensland and then follow up with a ‘short’ trip to Adelaide, there's not much you can do about the fixtures. So they put their finals preparation on hold for another week and set about going through some of the basics to keep themselves in good nick for the upcoming game against Adelaide. 

The crowd were excited early - there was a free kick to Hayden Ballantyne when Beau Waters put 50 cents into the back of Hayden and rode him like a shopping centre toy car.  This being little more than a training run, The Mayor didn't see the point in kicking a goal from an easy free kick so he nudged the ball to the left so it could be brought back into play. 

It proved a very productive judgement by Ballantyne and the ball was booted up the ground where the Fremantle midfielders went to work. Mundy, to Barlow, to Pavlich and through the goals. There was barely a goose to be seen as Fremantle put on a mini clinic. 

After a good stretch of the legs, some of the midfielders took turns to see who could lay the most ferocious tackle. Luckily they had really good tackling dummies. So soft. Like tackling a baby duck wearing a cloud. 

That got a bit boring after Daniel Kerr died and resurrected himself  the seventh time so they decided to go back to getting the ball and kicking it to Pav. So they did exactly that. They'd get the ball. They'd kick it. Pav would mark it. It was a flawless game plan.

Pavlich wanted to keep his eye in so he pushed himself out the pockets a couple of times for some extra practice but when Stephen Hill spotted him up on the dash through the middle, it would have been criminal not to kick the goal. So Pav brought up his second, much to the delight of the Fremantle crowd and the bloke in Market Square who scored himself a new football. 

The Fremantle defenders were doing their usual excellent job of staying out of Luke McPharlin's way while he made them look good but McPharlin was keen to unleash himself in front of the big crowd and lack of opposition. He delivered a text book hip and shoulder to Jack Darling (his hip hit Jack's shoulder) which brought the crowd to their feet but the umpire had the whistle to his lips faster than Ballantyne could run over to say  "Are you hurt, Darling?" then run off snickering to himself. 

The end result was that the Eagles wound up with one of the most common sights at any derby - a charity goal. 

It annoyed the Fremantle players a bit, not as much as Quinten Lynch's moustache annoyed them but it certainly riled them that someone would think St Luke McPharlin (or whatever the Baha'i equivalent is) would hit someone, even a filthy, stinking Eagle. 

So they put aside their focus on training and set themselves the task of humiliating the Eagles (a difficult task considering the Eagles were able to keep a straight face when naming Tom Swift in their side). 

It was beautiful to watch as an almost reborn Fremantle effortlessly waltzed the ball from one end of the ground to the other. It was classic Fremantle as the crowd found their voice again and the players queued up for their adulation. 

A rare effort into the forward line didn't land in Pavlich's hands (he'd kicked it in there) and the umpire decided he'd bounce it up to give Pav a chance to get back into position. But Kepler Bradley wasn't paying attention to what Pav was doing, he grabbed the ball out of the ruck and kicked it over to Mzungu (who was on his own because the Eagles players tend to see a black man with dreadlocks and assume it's their back up ruckman). Mzungu drilled the goal and Fremantle skipped another goal ahead. 

The ball went back to the centre and came straight back down to Freo's forward line - to Pavlich. He could have easily kicked the goal but he summed the situation up in his head and the humiliation of McKenzie was much better served by looping a handpass over his head to the goal square where a short, fat bloke by the name of Walters was loitering about. Walters dobbed the goal and the Dockers went into the first change with a 3 goal lead. 

It was  perfect start for Fremantle even Ross Lyon managed a smile. He had been belted after the last derby. You can get away with a lot as coach of Fremantle but if you let the Eagles pull your pants down then you'd better be prepared to drink instant coffee for the next few months. At the time he appeared to shrug the loss off as just another game but secretly it must have gotten to him. 

The discovery of how to beat the Eagles every single time has become shrouded in fanciful mythology but the secret has been passed down from coach to coach. Legend has it that all Ross needed to do was fill his heart with hatred and the secret would reveal itself to him.  It only took him one loss to realise that losing a derby is a horrific experience and, as the weeks passed, he learned to hate them like a native. 

They say, moment after finishing up his weekly interview with Basil Zempilas, his hatred reached saturation point and a folder mysteriously appeared on his desk with the key to unlocking derby bliss.  First you make them run themselves ragged trying to get their band of village idiots to cobble together a few goals and then get the ball and bolt down the guts while they argue with the umpires about being held.  It works every time and Ross had managed to get his team running from the backline to the forward line without anyone having to pause for a group discussion about how they would proceed for the rest of the passage of play. 

It was proving devastating. 

They headed back out for the second quarter, wary that the Eagles had a few derby tricks of their own. For one, the umpiring had been fairly even which is a sure sign that you're about to get crucified. They also hadn't unleashed the awesome power of their awesome ruck combination. Well, they had it was just that neither of them had had a kick yet. That was sure to change too...because everyone in WA knows that the Eagles have an awesome ruck combination. 

It all came down to who could strike first - Fremantle with their highly talented, well drilled and quite handsome group of players or the Eagles with their cheating and over hyped circus clowns. 

The Eagles certainly gave their all, throwing themselves about the place, diving here, diving there, flicking their head back so hard it's difficult to believe at least one of them didn't have to leave with a neck injury. You know, standard derby stuff. 

But Ross Lyon didn't want to rest on the laurels of coaches past and the Eagles' inadequacies at football, so he decided to throw something new into the mix in the hope of starting a new tradition - kicking Daniel Kerr in the nuts.  We've all dreamed of doing it at some point, just walking up to him, planting a Dunlop Volley between his legs then strolling off as he winces in pain but only Ross Lyon had the vision to bring it to life, with Matt deBoer given the honour of executing the attack on on the balls. 

It was a thing of beauty and one which is likely to change the way football is played for ever...as well as the way Daniel rides a bike. 

It stunned the players for a while, as you'd expect from such a radical tactic, which slowed Fremantle's scoring down to a crawl but, when the opportunity to start attacking presented itself again, Clancee Pearce got in on the action with a thumping bomb from somewhere near the centre square. The goal will be commemorated in a neck tattoo later in the week.

With most of the Eagles players now concentrating on protecting their testicles (or at least making it look like they had something to protect), Fremantle were free to concentrate on getting the footy and giving it to Matthew Pavlich. 

Pavlich was in a bit of form and had earned the nick name The Widow Maker in recent weeks. He didn't go around thumping people though, it was because he humiliated his opponent so badly that their wife would inevitably smother them with a pillow while they slept, to escape living the rest of their lives in shame. 

Sure, they could have just divorced and remarried but that's why Protestants usually end up with sucky nicknames. 

The Widow Maker continued to do who work on McKenzie, who John Worsfold clearly didn't like or he would have moved him, and as the ball came in long and fast, Pav was putting on a show for the supporters. There were reports of people foaming at the mouth when Pav flew over the top of a pack and brought down a screamer in the Shaun McManus Pocket (although sales of Subi Burgers were quite strong so it's hard to pin point the cause) and when the half time siren sounded over the top of the Freeee-ooooo chant, the Dockers had 32 point lead and were well on the way to locking up the derby and restoring the balance of good over evil. 

The crowd were happy, the players were excited, Ross Lyon had knocked off a salad roll in the last few minutes of the quarter...everyone was having a good time - oh, except for the mob up the road. One goal for the game, staring down belting and commodity prices were tanking. The only thing the Fremantle supporters were slightly disappointed about was that it wasn't an Eagles home game. Watching the Dockers win with a big home crowd is great but there's nothing quite like the sight of 40,000 Eagles migrating north during the third quarter of a derby. 

Of course, any WA policeman will tell you that an Eagle can be at their most dangerous when you've got them cornered and Fremantle were well aware that West Coast would come out swinging. Usually their swings miss and then they run off in the other direction but Fremantle knew they would need to keep their wits about them until the Eagles inevitably accepted defeat. 

So once again the Eagles pumped themselves up and strutted out to start another quarter of footy. They were hugely impressed with themselves when they got the quick centre clearance and had the ball in their forward line in the opening minute, unawares, even at this late stage, that that was the trap.

Off Fremantle ran with the ball - Fyfe to Mundy to Ballantyne to Pavlich and back to Ballantyne, who's little legs had just enough juice left in them to slot through another Fremantle goal. He was so exhausted he didn't even bother trying to milk a second kick.

Mzungu followed that up with his second goal of the game, a lovely soccer through to the cheersquad but disaster was bout to strike. 

That’s right, the Eagles finally kicked their second goal. Well technically they kicked their second goal, it was actually another very dubious free kick to Jack Darling but, even though the Eagles were yet to score a goal through actual play well into the third quarter, the Fremantle defenders were still down on themselves. 

Their spirits were back up again pretty soon though. Another goal went through of the majestic boot of Matthew Pavlich, taking him to the top of the league goal kicking ladder and into favouritism for the Coleman Medal - one of the few individual awards he's yet to win.  

With all the excitement, Adam McPhee and Zac Dawson must have lost concentration because they made a series of rare errors, each more rare than the last, which resulted in the Eagles back up ruckman tripping over the footy to score a goal. Pav got one back but the Eagles replied with two more. It was a goal kicking feast for the reformed druggies. 5 for a game. 

Fremantle took swift action (not to be confused with Tom Swift action which involves cutting your hair to make you look like the guy from The Never Ending Story). Ballantyne, Walters and Pavlich drove home goal after goal as the Eagles hopes of surviving with any semblance of self respect faded from slim to zero. 

When three quarter time came around, Fremantle had a 58 point lead and the half a dozen Eagles who'd snuck into the stadium were slinking away to go and watch a replay of the 1992 Grand Final and some old episodes of Telespin. 

That just left 40,000 Fremantle supporters and 30 more minutes to chant Freeee-ooooo and try and get themselves organised into a Mexican Wave. 

The wave proved too big an ask but Fremantle kept the pressure up on the Eagles. Pav kicked his eighth, won himself a Rosco medal and took his team home to a 65 point lead. In may respects a perfect game for the big man. His only regret...deBoer was the one who got to kick Daniel Kerr in the nuts.