While a lot of teams had been looking forward to the June bye for a rest and a chance to reset for the run to the finals, Fremantle had been looking a bit further to July. July was effectively  bye month for Fremantle. With games against the likes of Melbourne, Other Sydney and Poor Adelaide it was a classic series of phone-it-in games that would put Fremantle back in the eight and ready to storm home into the finals.

Th first week of the bye month was a game against one of the many dud clubs keen to focus on their west-ness, in particular the one with the Bulldog on their jumper.  Presumably a once proud club, the Bulldogs were languishing at the bottom of the ladder, only being held up by the Gold Coast and Fremantle's other bye teams and most at the ground viewed the day as an exercise in percentage building.

But the players had been looking forward to their bye month for quite a while. It had been a long,  sometimes grueling, season and they'd pencilled this week in for a lazy Sunday afternoon. Laid back and carefree, they kicked the ball back and forth at a pace that could have been described as pedestrian, assuming the pedestrian was carrying heavy shopping and trying to lay low because they'd seen someone across the street that they'd prefer not to bump into. 

A couple of Freo blokes, Kepler Bradley and Sexy Eyes Sutcliffe (not to say that Kepler's eyes aren't fetching, in their own way) were just in from the WAFL and hadn't quite adjusted to the pace of AFL footy, so they got caught out running hard and kicking long and direct to tall marking team mates, Crowley and Mayne. Unfortunately both Crowley and Mayne were both distracted, thinking about whether to wear the deep V-neck or the very deep V-neck shirt to the post game function, and sprayed the kicks. 

The Bulldogs seemed happy to go along with Fremantle's cruisey Sunday arvo session; after all, they'd been expecting an absolute belting, so it was a good twenty minutes into the game before someone got around to kicking a goal. It was from Pavlich, of course, who had had a gutful of blokes kicking it high to little blokes and not to him, so he decided to do some crumbing and snap a goal. Disapointingly he decided against running up to the nearest Western Bulldog and telling him he was getting toweled up.

The crowd loved it (although, after the first twenty minutes they would have been excited if the pigeon had decided to switch things up and face north). That was clearly the much needed ice breaker which would get the goals flowing and open up the game a bit for that percentage boosting win. 

What was quickly becoming apparent was that there were slightly different expectations on either side of the fence. While those on the outside had certain expectations regarding the quantity of goals kicked and quality of football on display, those on the inside had a completely different viewpoint - and so the Wesstern Bulldogs kicked goal. 

That seemed about where they were going leave the quarter, with a lot more of the kick to kick stuff (although technically, the ball has to travel 15 metres for it to be a genuine kick) before chaos erupted in the final seconds when Mayne was given a free kick. He slotted through the goal and the Dockers had a 7 point lead going into the first break. 

Polite applause sent the players into their huddles where the two coaches no doubt heaped praise on the players for such a disciplined first quarter. Meanwhile, in  a further indication that the world has gone topsy-turvy, some bloke shouted at the crowd through a microphone for a few minutes to get everyone fired up.  

They strolled back into position for the second quarter and it all looked very familiar - a short kick, a ball up, some handballs and another short kick and then a free kick that no one knew what it had been paid for. Fremantle were still dominating but the only movement from the goal umpire was when his foot went to sleep and he had to start wiggling his leg.

Eventually Freo worked themselves into a position where they could miss sitters in front of goals, and piled on the points - but the real action came at the other end. 

After  quarter and a half of letting Fremantle dominate the footy, the Bulldogs looked to have been pulling a rope -a-dope of cunning proportions even by rope-a-dope standards.

With Fremantle dropping off from a slow meander to a saunter, the Doggies made their move and put through three quick goals to take the lead, with Broughton kicking one the other way when he landed a handy free kick - that was absolutely there despite what many Bulldogs supporters and video footage will tell you. 

While the Freo supporters would normally be quite nervous after such a turn around in fortunes, they were still quite calm. The idea that Fremantle would lose to the Bulldogs, not to mention the consequences of the loss, was so incomprehensible that it just couldn't sink in - similar to the way Colin Barnett became premier.

So everyone sat quietly, checked out their phones, followed the life and times of the pigeon and generally killed time until circumstances changed. 

It was a fair wait but eventually Matt deBoer floated a perfectly weighted mongrel punt into the hands of Matt Pavlich who made it ok for everyone to look up again. 

There was a bit more kicking the footy about until the siren went and the Dockers went into the half time break with a 3 point lead. 

There were a lot of different ways the game could go at this point, nearly all of them better than the current way. It had been a tedious opening hour of footy and most of the crowd had gone out the back during the break in case the quality of the Auskick set expectations too high.

So, after twenty minutes of avoiding the passive smoke cloud hovering outside, pondering the pros and cons of buying a hotdog and leaving with food poisoning; and watching Pigeon Fight Club (the first rule of Pigeon Fight Club is - don't coo about Pigeon Fight Club) people started to wander back in for the long arduous task of watching a weekend game of football. 

Something was wrong though.  Adam McPhee took a mark on the half back line, which in itself was a bit out of character. More to the point though, he played on. He actually played on. He went for a bit of a run up the ground, got the ball to deBoer who moved it on at lighting pace to Kepler Bradley.  In typical style, Kepler did something that wasn't particularly pretty but proved very effective, sending the ball down into the forward line where Pavlich was just waiting to goosify blokes. 

Pav kicked the goal and Fremantle had completely a fully fledged bit of football playing. The crowd loved it but didn't get their hopes up that they'd see much more of it. 

They were wrong,

Pav had had enough. He'd worked his guts out for three years to get out of the midfield, he was finally in the forward line and they weren't letting him kick goals. So he decided 'delivery be damned' and just started marking the footy wherever it went. He had his second for the quarter a minute later and the crowd were on the brink of  becoming moderately rowdy.

Pav's enthusiasm for goals was infectious and pretty soon other blokes started attacking as well. Not all of them as successfully as Pavlich but the endevour was appreciated.  Chris Mayne jailed one after the umpire gave him a free kick for a slight brush to the shoulder, while Antoni Grover was rolled from the ground after being whacked in the head to push Freo’s lead out while Ryan Crowley got in on the action, celebrating his 100th attempt at soccering a goal out of his arse by actually getting it to go through, bringing the supporters to their feet and Crowley to his knees in appreciation of just how arsey a goal it was. 

Jon Griffin glided down the wing before delivering a lace out pass to Pavlich, on the lead, to help bring up Pav's 5th of the afternoon and push the Dockers out to a 5 goal lead - double the Dogs score. 

The Dockers had put through those 5 goals in less time than it had taken them to score their first, crushing the Dogs and pretty much shutting the gate. Naturally, with the knowledge that they could turn things on and put through a quick burst of goals when needed, they decided to ease up a bit, returning to their laid back, Sunday afternoon method of footy that had worked so adequately in the first half.

The crowd were calling for more but the discipline of the Dockers was too strong and they gave the crowd nothing. They held their ground, with a brief flirtation with excitement from Lower, and kept everything very casual, conceding just three goals to go into the three quarter time break with a more modest 22 point lead. 

Ross Lyon was pretty dirty with Pavlich. Out playing your direct opponent and using skill to beat someone wasn't part of the pre-game document package he'd handed around. Playing execution reliant football is a slap in the face to every one of the coaching staff, from the bloke who holds the white board to the bloke who holds the other whiteboard.  It was an outrage. 

So Pav apologised for his brief lapse and Fremantle ran back out to end the game with a sensible display of team football. Luckily the Bulldogs had chucked in the towel the minute they saw Pav storming out from full forward, early in the third, so Freo put on  few more very sensible goals and cruised in for a 38 point win.