When the Dockers failed to beat Adelaide and the Eagles were beaten by Sydney in the Qualifying finals, it was dubbed Black Saturday for Western Australian footy. Not because both the local teams had lost but because, with WA hosting the only football for the weekend, it meant the place was going to be over run with Victorians – and we haven’t finished building the big fence yet.

It was terrible news for the residents of Perth but what a week to be a Victorian.  They spend millions of dollars building indoor stadiums to try and create the sort of conditions and atmosphere they would have witnessed when they arrived at Subiaco Oval. Clear skies, not a breath of wind, warm weather and a packed stadium full of loud, excitable footy supporters. Absolutely perfect conditions for using the phrase perfect conditions for football.

Not many people go to the footy to see the conditions though (well, not many people who don’t support the Eagles) and what most of the forty odd thousand people came to see was Fremantle running rings around Melbourne and securing a crack at getting a crack at the Premiership.

The Demons would have had a slightly different angle on how they expected things panning out and would have been keen to get some early goals to silence the crowd. They must have been shocked then when they did put through the first two goals, not because they’d hit the front early but because it didn’t even come close to silencing the Fremantle crowd.

Everything they’d been told was a lie. The Freo supporters actually got louder, egging their team on to greater things. They were so loud Jeff Farmer couldn’t even hear what he was saying to himself. The Melbourne blokes were starting to get scared. The Chinese whispers making their way over to Melbourne last week were that WA supporters were jumping the fences and eating players at Subiaco Oval now.

When Heath Black’s raking left foot drove the ball straight to the top of the square and the crowd went up again, the Melbourne blokes started to panic. Ben Holland pulled out a rifle shot himself in the foot so they’d send him home. So when the ball hit the ground, Luke Webster had very little to contend with as he picked up the footy and snapped Freo’s first goal.

While the Melbourne players were wilting under the pressure of the crowd, the Freo boys were thriving on it. Blokes were body slamming Melbourne players into the turf, they were running them down like rodeo cowboys, jumping over them like Kangaroos on pogo sticks. Matthew Pavlich got so excited that he decided to unload on the goals just shy of the centre circle…and it went through.

The roar of the crowd was so loud, in ordinary circumstances a team would have just packed it up and gone home to fight again the next week but being a Semi Final there was no next week. Melbourne had to stick it out and, as a great testament to the Melbourne Football Club’s long standing interest in wrapping their arms around strong young men, the Demons tried to put the pressure back onto the Dockers by seeing how many tackles they could lay on the Freo boys.

It started to pay some dividends too. With  the Dockers over compensating for their lack of run in Adelaide, the Demons had pretty of chances to tackle and harass. Eventually they managed to paddle the ball up their end of the ground where Russell Robertson’s arse provided a much needed goal for the Dees.

But as big as it is, even Russell’s arse couldn’t produce enough goals to stop the Fremantle crowd and they lifted the Dockers again to the point where even staunch defender David Mundy was able to dob a goal from 60 metres out.

His goal took the Dockers into the first change 3 points up, knowing they’d been in a game of football but not all that worried about where the game was heading. When the second quarter got going though, and the Demons kicked the opening two goals from deep in the pocket, thoughts started to drift back to 2003 and the James Hird miracle bounce when it seemed fate had laid off on the Dockers at good odds.

Then a shocking bit of umpiring saw David Neitz get his first kick at Subiaco in living memory - and the fifty metre penalty that followed, for pointing out just how bad the umpiring was, saw him jail it from the goal square.

All of a sudden the Dockers were 16 points down. What was going in Fremantle’s favour though was that Melbourne had scored their goals so quickly and the queues at the dunnies were so long that half the crowd didn’t even realise that Fremantle had fallen behind. So when the ball went back into the centre they were just as loud and just as mad as ever. They were so vocal that it’s not hard to imagine that they convinced a few of the Freo players they were in front too.

When the ball went back to the centre, the Docker whisked it out of the middle and before you could say ‘he’s got his kicking boots on” Byron Schammer had joined the long line of Freo blokes claming they’d kicked a goal further  than Blighty’s.

It was amazing. Even a few goals down the Freo players were still choc full of confidence. Too much confidence can be a bad thing sometimes and Peter Bell’s attempt to join the Bigger than Blighty club was a perfect example. It caught everyone by surprise when he tried to kick the ball 80 metres and, as it dropped short, the Demons caught Freo on the rebound and ran the ball down to their forward line. Once it was there, Melbourne’s run of luck continued and Neitz kicked a goal from behind the hotdog stand to push Melbourne’s lead out to 15 points.

Fremantle actually started to look in a bit of trouble. The Dees were growing in confidence and Freo were spending a lot more time without the footy. There were even some sections of the crowd starting to sound a lot less jubilant. Freo needed a spark, something special to get them back into the game. Something like Jeff Farmer.

The Wiz scooped the ball up in one hand, used the other to balance himself as he swung around an imaginary light post and delivered a perfect pass to Ryan Murphy alone inside fifty.  Murphy split the middle and the Dockers started on the road back to the lead.

The Wiz continued to lead them down the road when the ball went back his way a few seconds later. This time his perfectly weighted pass went to Luke Webster. Webster kicked it with a fair degree of spasticity but redeemed himself moments later when he gave the Jeff Farmer treatment to Justin Longmuir. Jlo doesn’t miss them in front of the three tier stand and the Dockers had moved within a point.

As Fremantle started to find some run again, the fear in the eyes of the Melbourne players was noticeable. The Fremantle machine was in full swing, bringing the ball quickly down the guts and scaring the crap out of defenders as they faced one on one battles with the best forward line in the competition.  Pavlich, Farmer, Longmuir, they were all queuing up to take screamers and kick goals but it was Ryan Murphy who got the sit on Nathan Carroll to pull down the next screamer and, when he converted it into 6 points, the Dockers hit the front and the Freeeeee-ooooooooo chant echoed around Subi Oval and most of the Perth metropolitan area.

With the heat sapping their strength, the Dockers on the rampage and the crowd about to cause a seismic disturbance that threatened the Abrolhos Islands, the only thing that could save the Demons was the half time siren and when it rang, the sigh of relief from the Melbourne players almost drowned out the now standing Freo supporters.

Maybe it was the one eyed crowd, the confident swagger of Peter Bell or the general sookiness of Jeff White but, despite the fact that just six points separated the two teams, Fremantle looked to have the game in the bag. They were following the pre-match game plan of running rings around the Melbourne players, they were exuberant, ferocious and had all the hallmarks of a team about to perform unspeakable acts to the opposition.

The biggest challenge for Freo was going to be to make sure they hurt Melbourne on the scoreboard while they had their chance. Seven goals nine was a dangerous path to be walking down, with Sprinkler Murphy and Manic Mundy the worst offenders, missing some shots from straight in front while the Melbourne players seemed to be able to slot them through from any angle, facing in any direction.

That’s just how the second half started too. David Neitz, normally following a strict rule of only kicking goals from straight in front, kicked another goal from the boundary line. The scores were level, the crowd were getting rowdy and the game was back in the balance. In stepped Matthew Carr. Match winner.

Sometimes he’s happy to throw the blanket on the opposition, sometimes he’s happy to play the link man through the centre, sometimes he’s happy loping around on the wing with his hands in his pockets but other times, he likes to win games.

He found himself in a footrace to an open forward line with half a dozen Melbourne players.  Somehow he managed to fend off a couple and drag himself to the front of the pack. From there it was a simple case of getting hold of the ball, snapping around his body on an impossible angle and then watching it bounce through for a goal.

Not happy with the narrow lead, he started hunting down the footy like his brother hunts down blokes with exposed kidneys to punch. He chased, he tackled, he kicked and ran until eventually he had enough and buggered off down to the pocket for a rest. When he got there, Pavlich picked him out from 70 metres away with a centimetre perfect kick, Carr an into the goal square, handpassed to The Wiz and the two of them celebrated his goal to the sounds of Freeeeee-oooooooooo.

An unusually poor umpiring decision, even by their standards, saw Melbourne get that one back but The Wiz had a taste for the roar of the crowd. Heath Black sent a quick kick his way and Farmer threw an arm up into the air and the somehow got the ball to stick. After that display, kicking straight was never going to be an issue for him and, with the Dockers moving 13 points clear, he soaked up the applause before getting back down to business.

The Fremantle midfield had Melbourne covered. They kept sending the ball down into Freo’s forward line as if the ground was on a slant. Freo’s kicking for goal wasn’t doing their dominance justice but eventually the ball landed in the hands of Sure Foot Cook and, after crunching through half the Melbourne defenders, he spun himself around and snapped the Dockers 11th.

The faint creek of the gate shutting was starting to give the crowd something to compete with. The only place Fremantle didn’t have Melbourne’s pants down was on the scoreboard. Melbourne hardly had a clean possession, every time they did get the ball they were swamped by Freo players. But despite their dominance, as the three quarter time siren approached, Russell Robertson’s arse came back into play and it bounced through an unlikely Melbourne goal. The margin moved back in to the teens and the gate sprung back open.

17 points stood between Fremantle and a Preliminary final but it wasn’t a case of hanging on, the crowd were baying for blood. They wanted to see Freo wrap the game up as quickly as possible – those Mexicans weren’t going to wave to themselves.

It was the Demons who drew first blood though. The umpires had decided to assert themselves on the game in the final term and set up and easy goal for Brad Miller. Melbourne closed the gap down to 11 points and the unflappable Freo crowd suddenly became ever so slightly flapped.

Chris Connolly got on the phone straight away and sent the message out with the runner to Matthew Carr. “We need a match winner” he yelled. So Matthew wandered down to the forward line, waited for the next booming kick from Heath Black to make it’s way down there, then kicked the steadier.

The Melbourne players heads dropped quicker than a Quentin Lynch mark. Even over the sound of forty thousand people chanting Freeeeeee-oooooooo they heard the gate shut. And when Pavlich took all of twenty seconds to kick another one, the Demons were gone.

It was party time for Fremantle as the supporters celebrated watching their first win in the finals and the last game most of them would see for the season. Justin Longmuir sent them into an unholy frenzy when he delivered a bone crunching shepherd on Smith to clear the path for Des Headland. Des strolled into an pen goal to kick the Dockers 14th and see them finish the day 28 points the better side and a win away from a Grand Final parade.