Matthew Pavlich had had a bad week. It started on the trip home from Queensland when the movie was The Lincoln Lawyer. The week went downhill from there, if you can believe it. He got back to find out that his car had been towed after his driver had parked it facing the wrong way in a one way street and someone had reported it to the council (Ben Elton has a lot of time on his hands these days).  Then he got a message from the club telling him they couldn’t get someone to ghost write his blog for him, and he wasn’t going to get paid for writing it. But his biggest issue was that Shane Parker kept trying to kill him.
If there wasn’t some sort of Ewok style trap waiting for him every time he stepped outside, there was an elaborate booby trap in his locker. It seemed Parker was very attached to his games record and would stop at very little to hang onto it. Luckily for Pav, though, Shane had employed the skills of his brother Dan so none of the assassination attempts even came close to working. But it was still distressing when he woke up to a horses head in his bed - particularly because Dan hadn’t been able to severe the head completely and Pav had to wait around till the vet arrived, making him late for training.

Things didn’t get any easier for Pav on Saturday night. To start with, for the first time ever, the Junior Docker wasn’t wearing number 29 and the big fella. Worried that he’d lost the kids, he was distracted and lost the toss as a result. Then he had to line up in the centre rather then the forward line because so many of his team mates are soft, have brittle bones or can’t jump up and down without snapping something in their knee.

As the game got going he got belted, bashed, shoved about and victimised by the umpires but he kept at, taking the knocks belting the ball forward then taking a few deep breaths before doing it all again - because there was no centre half forward to take a grab and kick a big goal.

The first ten minutes was like a purple slingshot (well a deep blue slingshot if you were standing more than three metres back). Pav and his rag tag bunch of midfielders would load up, send the ball flying down into the forward line and the forwards would bugger about for a few minutes before sending it back to the centre for Pav to reload and fire it back at them.

Eventually Kepler Bradley took pity on Pav, wandered down into the forward line and showed them how to kick a goal using his patented method - drop the ball on your boot and then soak in the cheers as the goal umpire waves his flags. Patent laws have become very slack.

There’s a law in football that says the more chances in front of goals you bugger up, the easier the opposition’s next goal is going to look and while Geelong are not generally known as sticklers for the rules, they were apparently passionate about this one.  They chipped they ball forward, stood back as the Freo defenders contemplated the deliberate rushed behind rule until Menzel rocked up and snapped a goal.

The Cats decided to press the point too, kicking another three easy goals just to be on the safe side as some early enthusiasm from the Fremantle crowd was channelled into abuse as they  turned on a combination of the umpires, for their substandard decision making skills; Cameron Ling, for his red hair; Paul Chapman, for his lack of hair; and one bloke who decided it was all  Steven Dodd’s fault, despite Stompy no longer being on the Fremantle list.

With Fremantle 20 points down, there were a lot of people who’d been promised an exciting future who weren’t liking what they were seeing. So in stepped The Kepler.

A big boot from The Pav got the ball over the Geelong flood and into the calm hands of Greg Broughton.  He got it forward to Michael Walters who used his exquisite foot to hit up Kepler Bradley in the forward pocket. It was a tricky kick, Kepler made it trickier but the kick was still a beauty and Fremantle started their fight back.

A bit of dancing in the centre saw Stephen HIll get the ball moving forward. Luke McPharlin wandered down the ground to try and get some relief from a vindictive umpire and managed to pick up a few kicks, putting one of them onto the chest of Chris Mayne. Mayne unloaded from 50 with a beautiful kick, sailing it over the goal umpires hat and putting the Dockers back in the hunt with a 7 point margin.

The good work was undone when Geelong’s Ranga In Chief was allowed to get loose and seagull himself a goal but Mundy and his enchanted boot had a quick reply and Fremantle went into the first change less than a goal off the pace.

Mark Harvey’s quarter time address was pretty simple. He put the whiteboard up, drew a straight line and said ‘kick it like this’. Simple, to the point and in stark contrast to Chris Scott who had given his quarter time address in Haiku verse to try and impress his new club.

Sadly it appeared a win for literature over geometry with Fremantle returning to the ground still unable to grasp the concept of the kick that went straight and between the bigger two of the four posts.

With the Dockers buggering about, the payback rule was brought into effect again and Geelong put through two easy goals, against the flow of play, to take the lead back out to four goals.

Pavlich stuck to his guns, copping the hits in the middle and driving the ball forward but the glamour blokes just couldn’t get their act together. Meanwhile the defenders were getting dizzy with Chris Scott’s crazy zigg zagg attack method he’d employed, clearly something he picked up during his time in Fremantle from watching old tapes of Clive Waterhouse trying to cross the road (why Gerard Neesham had taped Clive crossing the the road is anyone’s guess).  

Each Geelong goal had sent more and more supporters quiet, to the point that you could actually hear the umpires telling Hayden Ballantyne to stop whatever it was he was doing. That all changed when The Purple Baron spotted up Sonny Walters in the forward line and Sonny booted the footy, off a step, from 65 metres out for a goal. The celebration was subdued but the crowd liked it all the same and Fremantle started the second wave of their comeback.

Another big de Boer hoof forward made it’s way to the Matthew Pavlich direction. Pav jumped at the ball but was set upon by 6, possibly 7 Geelong players. Two of them went low, three of them went high and a couple more  worked the spine. The umpire reluctantly paid a free kick before Cameron Ling, unprovoked, viciously attacked little Hadeyn Ballantyne; sending him to the ground with a crushing punch to the gut. A fifty was paid and Pav sent the footy into the car park to bring Freo back within 9 points.

The Freo players were firing up now. Young Hayden, just trying to make a go of this AFL caper, would have done nothing to  deserve that sort of treatment from Ling, who himself had been the victim of a similar attack a few years earlier at the hands, or elbow, of a former Essendon player turned Gold Coast coach.

Revenge was in the air and, with Ling hiding out on the bench, Aaron Sanidlands was forced to dish out some punishment to the next ugliest Cat, hitting Steve Johnson so hard that his soul momentarily left his body, went down to The Vic for a couple of quiet ones then returned to his body only to find that Ballantyne had recovered, told Bartell his wife was a slut and kicked a magnificent goal to have Freo 3 points down at half time.

It was both a disappointing and an impressive effort by Fremantle. They’d managed to keep themselves in the game through hard work and persistence but they’d kept themselves from a handy lead with some terrible work in front of goals and the odd turnover in the middle. If they could manage to add some forward line polish to their workman like effort around the ground they’d have the Cats done by half time.

Mark Harvey wasn’t up for any of that though. He’s a man who plays the cards he’s dealt and went into a frenzy of moving around tiny white magnets and scribbling things on the white board. He was leaving nothing to chance.

Over in the other change rooms, Chris Scott was playing a similar game. With his main rival, his brother Brad, unlikely to provide any sort of contest for him he had to take down his former boss with a display of coaching so brilliant that only the three greatest football minds in the country could decipher it - two of those minds being in James Hird’s head and the other one in a jar at the MCG Museum.

As you can imagine, the result of it all was a quarter of tactics and setups with very little football being played. The ball went up one end, a brilliant tactical masterstroke would stop the team from scoring and so the ball would go back up the other end. It was like a giant game of chess. Well, maybe more like a game of draughts.
Well, probably not draughts but a well played game of Backgammon.
Well, there are a lot of nuances in Hungry, Hungry Hippos at the top level. It was probably more like that.

The blokes in the box were having a great time. The players and the supporters all had headaches. Menzel and Chapman managed to break the shackles of coaching tactics to kick a goal each and Stephen Hill can’t be controlled by a bloke with a phone and a fluro tracksuit so he too dobbed one. With a quarter to go, not much had changed but Geelong had extended their lead out to 9 points.

A truce was agreed to by the coaches and when the fourth quarter got going they decided just to let the boys play...to an extent.

Fremantle brought Rhys Palmer on as the sub, a controversial move considering most of the oil he had applied to himself pre-game had been dissolved by the sweat and the chemicals in the fluro substitute vest but his extra run looked just the ticket for Fremantle to finish the job on Geelong.

It was a slow start for Freo. Fyfe tried tirelessly to set his forwards up for a goal but they had some sort of obsessive compulsive disorder that was forcing them kick points. The rebound saw Duncan kick a Cat goal and the silence of the crowd was replaced with that most horrible of sounds, the Freo murmur - complete with head shaking and Record waving.

They quickly switched back from disappointment mode to excitement mode though, when Kepler Bradley returned to the winners circle with one of his famous goal square goals.

The crowd were happy again. Cheering, booing, making that sound you make when someone kicks it out of bounds on the full when they had players open in the middle. The game was back on and Freo were coming home with the proverbial wet sail.

But they buggered it up again and Jimmy Bartel swooped in and kicked a goal to give the Cats a 13 point lead.

They might have been prone to kicking points but the Dockers don’t give in as easily as the supporters. They fought on. They drove the ball forward but couldn’t buy a goal. The crowd started to lose hope with every failed attempt from Freo as it started to look like the clock, like their kicking, was going to get the better of them.

But wait. What was this? The Mayor of Mandurah had the ball in the back pocket. No he didn’t, he had the ball in the centre. Hang on, Pav had the ball in the centre. Oops, he fumbled it and The Mayor had it again. No, he had it on the half forward line. Actually, no. He was celebrating a goal on the half forward line. Nope, wrong again. He was celebrating a goal in the centre. Try again, he was hanging over the fence at the other end giving high fives to the people in the disabled seats as they celebrated the greatest goal ever kicked at Subiaco Oval.

The crowd were in a fervor. Fremantle had toyed with their hearts all match but this was absolutely the turning point. This time they were going to finish it off and bring home the win.

Just to prove their point, Ryan Crowley thumped the ball long to the forward line where Chris Mayne brought down a screamer. 30 metres out, directly in front. He couldn’t miss this one.

Well, he wouldn’t miss the next one.
Well, Pav wouldn’t miss one from the same spot.
Well, McPhee wouldn’t....nah, nobody’s buying that.

After so many missed chances, it was inevitable. Geelong ran the ball down the ground for an easy goal and shut the gate on Freo, winning by 11 points and leaving Fremantle with something to keep them occupied at training during the week.