Heritage Round came around once again and this year Fremantle decided to do something different. In keeping with the spirit of pointing out that there is life outside of the VFL, Fremantle decided to celebrate the 1979 derby grand final. 

1979 wasn’t just a game of football, it was the focal point of Australia’s longest running and most bitter feud. A city divided along perpendicular lines for over a hundred years and, after 79 of them, they played a match to the death in front of more West Australians than any game of football before or since.

So Fremantle pulled on the blue and white of East Fremantle and Sydney the red and white of South Fremantle and headed to the closest thing left to a suburban football ground in the AFL, the SCG.

Unfortunately the historic moment was lost on the quaint theatre going Sydney locals. Afraid the water falling from the sky would affect the latte status of their coffee, most stayed away. The ones that were able to find a top for their drinks were probably under the impression that Fremantle was something the Real Estate Agent threw in if you bought the place with harbour views and a built in fireplace.

The rain wasn’t a welcome sight for Fremantle either. With their lively forward line and a goal hungry defence, a wet day played right into the Swans hands. With their flooding and crowding the ball, they only change Sydney had to consider to their game was weather to go with the long sleeves or the short sleeves – or in Adam Goodes’ case the long stockings or the hotpants.

Goodes went with the long stockings which killed the romance of the heritage round a bit (after all, Claremont weren’t playing) but, as the rain bucketed down and the cricket pitch turned to mud, it wasn’t quite Perth in the spring but  there was a bit of old school footy about it all.

Sydney won the ball out of the centre at the first bounce and earned the luxury of getting to play the game in their half for the opening stint with pack after pack forming, probably so the little midfielders could shelter under Aaron Sandilands. Believing their own hype, the Swans tried to put a few goals through from what would have been strange angles even on a dry day, before Michael O’Loughlin snuck behind the Freo defence, took a mark directly in front and slotted it through.

The rain kept falling and the game continued in a similar vein. Blokes digging in under packs, tackling ferociously, heaping on the pressure, thumping the ball down the line, booting it long and then starting all over again – great wet weather footy by Fremantle, just another day at the office for the Swans.  Even the umpires had the good sense to abandon their ticky touchwood new millennium rules and put the whistles away for a change.

Gradually the rain eased to a heavy downpour and the Dockers started to push harder into attack. They had a few pings of their own and, when one pulled up ten metres short, the ball bounced in the goal square and Jeff Farmer had his head ripped from his body. Before he even had a chance to exaggerate it for the umpire, he was being given the ball, put back on an angle and was kicking Fremantle’s first goal.

Despite the rain, it didn’t look like the floodgates were going to open. Back in the middle and the ball wasn’t going anywhere fast. Fremantle’s defensive skills were shining through as the Swans struggled to tweak their game plan for the wet.

As they slogged it out for another ten minutes, the clock wound down without a lot of work for the goal umpires.  When the quarter time siren sounded it was one goal each, with Sydney putting through three more points to put them in front.

But while Sydney had the lead Fremantle had one big advantage. With Pavlich and Tarrant camped down in the forward line in the rain for half an hour, there was bound to be some hazardous puddles of hair care product just waiting to slip someone up. If they kept up their intensity and their defenders could keep their feet they were a good chance.

The second quarter started badly. All the Fremantle players seemed to fall over simultaneously in the centre square and O’Keefe got hold of the footy and put it on top Barry Hall’s chest. It wasn’t a Grand Final so Hall managed to kick it with some degree of accuracy and the Swans had skipped out to a handy lead inside a minute.

It was a short lived bit of fortune, though, as signs that the game was opening up started to show. Dean Solomon bounced around the packs like a pinball, desperate to get the footy to one of his team mates. Eventually, he found a gap and the ball found its way to Heath Black. Black gave it off to Mundy, who bombed it long to the goal square where Pav flung himself into the air and brought down a screamer on the goal line before crashing into the fence. Accuracy wasn’t an issue and Freo had their second goal on the board.

A fluky kick from O’Keefe saw the Swans rewarded for playing dumb football but Fremantle had started to wrestle the ascendency. Jeff Farmer and Matthew Pavlich were proving a problem for the Swans defenders and Fremantle’s well practiced routine of getting the ball in the middle and booting it up the guts had finally found its niche.

When Pav got hold of one kick and found some space, he sucked Bolton into thinking he was ordinary, sold him a dummy so big even Barry Hall would have struggled to spit it, and chipped the ball over the Chris Tarrant who’d floated into a gap. Tarrant’s kick was perfect and the Dockers moved 6 points closer.

The rain hadn’t eased so the game was still being played on Sydney’s terms but now it was being played in Fremantle’s half. With what seemed to be every Swans player going back to the 1970’s clogging up Fremantle forward line, kicking goals still wasn’t an easy task. The trick for Fremantle was to let the Swans get the ball down toward Barry Hall. At that point, Grover was able pull Hall’s pants down, send the ball back to a more open forward line and Des Headland kicked the Dockers into the lead. Dessy was fired up. Sydney were in trouble.

As the ball made its way back up Fremantle’s end, Sydney dipped back into the 60’s for players to add to the flood. Bob Skilton was marshalling them like he’d never left the game.  It was getting to the point were there wasn’t enough room to actually fit the football down there anymore and it was eventually squeezed out and made its way down Sydney’s end. Sydney snuck back into the lead with some ambitious attempts at goal before Schneider snuck one through and put the Dockers 8 points down.

The Dockers had left the SCG with enough regrets over the years that they weren’t going to be denied this time and fought back hard. They threw themselves at the footy, they threw themselves at the Swans, a few of them through Swans at the footy until eventually Jeff Farmer’s young protégé, Scott Thornton, took a big grab inside fifty and belted through Fremantle’s fifth just in time for the half time siren.

The Dockers trudged off the ground with their heads soaked but held high, 2 points behind but having held their own in the worst conditions they could have asked for.

A week earlier, Fremantle had kicked more goals at this point than either side had this week. The Swans on the other hand had taken to the wet and were twice their half time score from their match against the Cats. With no sign of the rain subsiding, Schwabby’s tight purse strings only covering one set of blue and white jumpers and no clothes dryers , and the umpires yet to find a way to crucify Fremantle, the Freo players were under no illusions about how hard they were going to have to work in the second half if they were to get over the line by the day’s end.

It wasn’t so much hard work as sheer brilliance that kicked off their third quarter though. Shane Parker on the bolt out of defence and Jeff Famer sixty metres away surrounded by Sydney players – it was an accident waiting to happen. Parker unloaded with the new footy and Jeff Farmer didn’t even have to break stride as he ran back with the flight of the ball. The ball landed in his arms and he didn’t even bother to play up for a fifty, taking his kick from just outside the goal square and putting it straight over the goal umpires head.

Freo were in the lead and the pressure was back on the Swans so they dipped back into the 50’s and went the heavy press. If Fremantle stretched their lead out too much further, Roy Cazaly was getting to get a run.

It didn’t worry the Dockers though, they kept firing the ball in long and slowly edging out their lead. They just couldn’t manage enough room to get a clean shot away on goals.

With goals not coming, Sydney, as they are want to do, started to revel in the slow grind of the game. With one goal kicked in half a quarter and Jeff Farmer leaving the ground with a crook groin, the Swans defenders dared to push the ball up their end occasionally.

Then occasionally became regularly and, with five minutes left on the clock, regularly became a goal kicking spree. With Freo unable to move the ball back across the centre line all they could do was hang on in quiet desperation until the siren gave them some respite. It took 4 goals before that siren came and the Dockers went into the final change of ends staring blankly at a 23 point deficit.

It was going to take a big final quarter for Fremantle to get over the line. What the Swans didn’t know though, was that, in 1979, after a close fought game, the blue and white team over ran the red and whites for a comfortable victory.

That’s something it may have been beneficial to tell the Swans. Had they know, they might not have been so keen to deviate from history and set Barry Hall up for a goal early in the last quarter.

It put the Dockers 5 and a bit goals down with a wet ground and a couple of very tired legs each. But Fremantle weren’t going to go silly though, they played it cool like Steve Waugh did at the same venue against the Poms a few years earlier.

First they let the Swans think they were just going to go through the motions until the end of play. Then they gradually wrestled back control. Then they made their move. Pavlich soccered one through from the goal square, McManus took a mark, took his time and dobbed one from fifty out to make the target all of a sudden look very gettable. Then Macca struck again, defying the conditions and his ability by slotting one through on the run from deep in the pocket. Fremantle were coming at them and coming hard.

The Dockers wasted no time moving the ball into their forward line again and the rain was being washed off the Sydney defenders foreheads by the beads of sweat. It was  a matter of who was going to kick the next goal rather than when.

But then the dodgy umpire from the subcontinent stuck his head up and turned the momentum, in highly suspicious circumstances, by giving Barry Hall a free kick for what appeared to be whinging consistently for the entire day.

This time Fremantle weren’t foxing when they looked to be waiting for the end of play and Sydney went on to win by 28 points.