“Have a look at that.” Mark Harvey said to them. “Next year they’ll be sending us to the bad part of Sydney”.

 

The game plan was simple, as it always is in Sydney, get in, get the four points, get home as quickly as possible. 

 

Pavlich won the toss and kicked to the least dirty end of the ground. Presumably in the hope that the Swans players would contract some sort of disease. It was a master stroke because the noise of the barking stray dogs at the other end would have drowned out the yapping of Hayden Ballantyne in the forward line. Which would have stopped Rhyce Shaw from reacting. Which would have cost Freo and the little bloke a goal. 

 

Hayden’s exuberance was going to mean more to Fremantle than just the goals he was going to kick, though, because the Swans signalled their intentions early - to bog the game down and wait for the rain to return to bog it down some more.

 

Sydney threw the lot at Fremantle, the hard tackling, the poncy half throws in the packs to move the ball gradually down the ground and the scrappy goals kicked off the ground while everyone else is waiting for the umpire to call a ball up. Their supporter seemed to enjoy it.

 

Of course, in your typical Sydney arm wrestle there is a thrust for ever parry and Fremantle kept their loyal (yet someone confused about which team they supported if the “Flying High” banner was anything to go by) band of blue flag wavers were given just as much to cheer about. The Dockers had returned to the SCG with their no nonsense - if bleeds you can kill it and if it doesn’t bleed it’s still fun to try - footy that brought them their drought breaking win a year earlier. Everyone had a role to play, deBoer lead the tackling charge, Palmer led the negotiating small spaces charge, Hayden lead the time and space manipulation charge, McPhee lead the getting in the way charge and Nat Fyfe was so far in front of everyone on the ground that whatever charge he lead was a bit pointless, gliding around the ground picking up the football and putting it onto the chest of the best positioned Docker - whether they’d asked for it or not. 

 

But after a quarter of scintillating Fremantle football and mundane Sydney floodball, the two teams couldn’t be separated. They’d gone goal for goal, kicking three each and sitting on 20 points each. As they expected, it was going to be a long, hard slog until one team cracked. 

 

Mark Harvey was pretty keen for it to be the Swans who cracked first, not just because of the all important 4 points, their position in the top 8, confidence from a win and so on and so fourth, but mainly because once the Swans fell away the number of ball ups and throws in would be halved - which would make the game shorter and mean he could get on the plan and fly home marginally earlier.  

 

A bit of sun broke through as the teams broke from their huddle, which only managed to improve visibility of the ground and make Fremantle want to fulfill their coach’s wishes even faster. 

 

They hit the Swans as hard as they could when the second quarter got going. They were brutal as the red and white jumpers of the Swans proved a handy way to avoid the blood rule slowing the game down. Roger Hayden showed he’d lost nothing in his long stint on the sidelines as he ran a merry dance around the Swans forwards. 

 

After he’d eventually lured every Swans players to take him on, like the hero in a 70’s Kung Fu movie, he slipped the ball out to Pavlich, Pavlich ran the ball down the ground (which is about 6 strides for Pav) then chipped the ball onto the chest of Matt deBoer. 

 

Golden Boots deBoer slotted it through and Freo took the lead. 

 

Some of the Fremantle players may have gotten carried away with the goosification of the Sydney forwards and bit of lairising from Roberton saw Heath Grundy get a goal against the flow of play but Fremantle’s desire to get home as quickly as possible was unrelenting. 

 

They took the ball from end to end, each possession cleaner and more dynamic than the last as Duffield went to Pavlich, Pavlich to Johnson,. Johnson to de Boer, de Boer to Mayne and Mayne into the goal umpires head.  The crowd were left silent. They’d never seen such thing. 

 

They then broke the goal for goal tempo of the game with Hill getting the benefits of Ballantyne’s unrelenting niggle on Heath Shaw and kicking his first for the day. Zac Clarke followed up with the Dockers third in a row, pushing them out to a  20 point lead with a couple of minutes till half time. 

 

It was the break Freo had been waiting for. A good start to the second half and they’d have these Sydney chumps done and dusted. 

 

A funny thing about Fremantle though. They‘ve got excellent drainage - they can’t flood. Yet despite a repeated lack of talent when it comes to shutting a game down in the last couple of minutes, they persist at trying it. They coughed up two late goals and went into half time with just the 7 points of wiggle room.

 

Mark Harvey wasn’t happy but, since it was mostly his fault, there wasn’t anyone to tear into as he stormed into the rooms. He gave them a good old spray anyway and made sure that they knew -  if he ever told them to flood again, and they listened to him,  they’ve got no one to blame but themselves.

 

Confused but fired up, Fremantle headed back for another half of belting up Swans and laughing in the face of their widows. The trick was to be able to engage in that hobby and combine it with the hard work of kicking goals to belt them on the scoreboard as well.

 

Freo got off to a good start. The start was good but the goal that got them the start was phenomenal. Nat Fyfe made it hard to argue that he’s not a more evolved being than the rest of us. It’s hard to say how he even got hold of the ball, it just sort of appeared in his hands as he was taking a breather, leaning on the fence. All that is clear is that he somehow got it, left half a dozen Sydney players dumbfounded, lying face down on the ground, then kicked the ball up, left, right, left again, a little bit back to the right and then down into the goal square and through for a goal. He celebrated with a drink of water and a jog back to the middle. 

 

Seeing just how much better Fyfe was at this football caper than them, the other Fremantle players had their confidence shattered. They went a bit quiet for a few minutes as Lewis Roberts-Thompson tried to achieve his person goal of kicking one goal for each of the last names he has. He only managed two but it cut back into Fremantle’s lead and brought the Swans within 2 points. 

 

Fremantle were getting nowhere with this to-ing and fro-ing business . At this rate they were going to still be kicking around at night and no one wanted to be hanging around the streets of Sydney when the CHUDs came out.  So they made their move. 

 

As moves go, it was a pretty good one too. Chris Mayne started them off with one of his vice like tackles, on Teddy Richards, in the goal square. That’s when the rain started falling.

 

A bit of rain make the pinches sting and that was the tipping point for Rhyce Shaw. Punches started flying, McPhee got involved, it tipped over from a bit of a to-do into a full blown dust up and Fremantle knew they had the Swans rattled. 

 

Rhys Palmer was steering clear of any trouble and wandered down to the forward line where he was able to pounce on a loose ball and run to within scoring distance, booting the footy from the goal line. 

 

That gave Ballantyne some more scope to gob off, this time he got into Grundy, drawing a free kick and getting a goal without the ball returning to the centre. 

 

They’d kicked three goals clear, the Swans supporter was booing his lungs out and the Swans players were so busy arguing with the umpires that they barely had time to react to the fourth wave of Ballantyne niggle. Always professional, Fremantle returned their focus to less controversial means of goal kicking and took advantage of the poor discipline of the Sydney types.

 

What followed was some of the best footy of the year from the Dockers. The magnificence of Nat Fyfe combined with the majesty of Matthew Pavlich to bring up goal number 12. 

 

Next, Chris Mayne flung his body at the football to give it a back hander before bracing himself for the oncoming wall of Swans players but it was just enough to change the momentum of the ball and send it in Michael Johnson’s direction. Johnson scooped it up booted the goal and copped the wall which had redirected itself at him.

 

Then to finish off the quarter, Hayden Ballantyne gave his mouth a rest and let his boots do some talking. A quick clearance had the ball down in his direction. The rain was bucketing down, the Swans supporter was showering him with spit and Rhyce Shaw’s tears were washing away the other two but the little bloke doesn’t worry about such things. He hugged the boundary like a tiny car on a scalextric track, waiting till the angle went from quite hard, then difficult, all the way around to impossible before jailing the goal and celebrating on his invisible pogo stick. 

 

Freo had kicked six in a row and taken a 38 point lead in not much more than half a quarter. The Swans were completely blown away, they were gone, broken. A defeated football team....so mark Harvey told them to flood...and they listened. 

 

It was like watching baby ducks cross a freeway as Fremantle attempted to defend their lead for the entire quarter. 

 

It started slow. Things seemed to be going reasonably weel. Goodes got the first goal, no drama there. Hannebery got the second one - time to just double check those sums. Parker got the third one - carry the one, hang on - that’s just over three goals. 

 

Adam Goodes got another one. This wasn’t going to end well.

 

The game was being played in Sydney’s half and Fremantle didn’t seem to have any desire to change that. The rain bucketing down again wasn’t helping either - and the umpires had turned on the Dockers too. It had the makings of a disaster. 

 

Heath Shaw had managed to dry his tears and stop giving away free kicks to somehow pull a kick out of his proverbial arse, in torrential rain, that had no rights to go through. It was a 7 point game. 

 

It seemed like a good time for Fremantle to settle, perhaps attack a bit, but Fremantle thought they’d give the Swans one more look at it. This time the kick wasn’t so lucky though, and Fremantle only conceded a point. 

 

There was a goal between them. It was making for a very tense Sunday. Those back in Freo just sitting down after church were going to have to head back out again - to confess the sin of what they’d just said about Adam McPhee and then to buy a new tv (just one trip for the Protestants if they headed over to Reverend Tim’s House of Absolution & Discount Plasmas) . Those non-church goers were free to keep slipping into McPhee while they search for batteries to the wireless.

 

The cool head of Garrick Ibbotson got the ball moving and, having decided to abandon their plan to ride out the last quarter in defense, gradually moved the ball down the ground. It was the Swans’ turn to panic now. In the great tradition of Irishmen losing their sides games, Kennelly gave away a fifty metre penalty. Freo were withing striking distance now, it was all coming back to them - brilliant attacking footy. That was the key.

 

deBoer missed the lot. 

 

Never mind though, they had the ball in the right half of the ground, Sydney couldn’t cope with the pressure still. They started reverting to local customs - throwing the ball. Barlow saw it first, and he started celebrating. A few seconds later the umpire blew his whistle. Nick Lower had been given a free kick.

 

He checked the wind, he pulled up his socks, he cramped up, queried the mark, asked the umpire how his weekend had been and when the clock was sufficiently eaten up he rubbed salt into the wound by dobbing the goal.  They ran from everywhere to celebrate (except Fyfe who just sort of floated over) then packed their bags and headed for the nearest airport.