Geelong – premiers, unbeaten since round 21 last year, widely acknowledged as the best team going around – rocked into Perth to take on Fremantle, who had their season precariously perched at 1-4 and sitting in 14th, having been smashed by Richmond at the same venue two weeks earlier.
Yet, when veteran Dean Solomon took a hanger over Josh Hunt and converted 12 minutes into the second term, the Dockers led by 39 points. And then, when giant ruckman Aaron Sandilands marked and snapped a goal 19 minutes into the third, they led by 27 after the Cats had edged back to within two points at half-time.
The Cats got out to an eight-point lead twenty minutes into the last and hung on to win by one, but small forward Paul Chapman said it was an indication of how the slightest slip up could cost you in today's footy.
"That's AFL footy for you, isn't it? If you're off ten per cent – five per cent – you get found out. You look like you're not trying and all of a sudden, the other team should be in the top four, and that's the way they looked in the first quarter," he said.
"As you said, you've just got to be off a little bit, and you get found out."
The Cats played a sublime time-on period in the second term, booting six straight majors in ten minutes, but Chapman said they had to produce more football of that quality.
"I don't know – we just clicked, we started to get some ball, and it just sort of all happened for us. I don't think you can play better footy than that, but it's doing it for four quarters.
"Freo were on top of their game – they played really well, and obviously the last kick hit the post, and it could have gone through and you'd be in there talking to them, so it was just one of those days and one of those games, and we're just lucky we got the four points."
If the second quarter was superb, breathtaking footy, the last was dogged, grinding hard work.
"We knew it was going to be a slog – we knew they wanted to slow the game down and everything like that. We just wanted to take the footy and move it as quickly as we could, get it into our forward line, hopefully finish off with some goals, and we were lucky enough to."
