IF VICTORIANS loved beating West Australians one tenth as much as most West Aussies think they do, Jeff Kennett would have been doing a jig in the Hawks rooms after his side saw off Fremantle on Saturday night.

But the Vics aren’t the obsessed ones, so the Hawks president was simply standing and observing with a slight smile on his face, soaking in the joy, as players joked and laughed as they did their mini-recovery and got ready for the long flight home.

Winning at Subiaco Oval is notoriously difficult – Hawthorn had won just once in their previous seven trips to the West – but the visitors were clearly the better side, despite twice letting near six-goal leads dwindle dangerously.

Kennett admitted he was happy just to leave with the points.

“Yes, particularly when you think we only had a six-day turnaround, and it’s never easy over here when you do the trip, especially after a short turnaround,” he said.

“And it was a tough game – hot for both sides, and it was almost a game in quarters, wasn’t it? It varied quite considerably, but it was a very, very good win.”

The Hawks led by 34 points early in the third term before Fremantle kicked six of the next seven goals to get it back to within three points.

And then again after the Hawks kicked the last of the third quarter and the first four of the last, Fremantle got back to a smaller margin with the last three goals of the match.

“I was more worried towards the end than I was in the third quarter, but I think we got the last goal in the third quarter and the first in the fourth and that started a bit of a roll, but they came back very well in the last five or ten minutes of the game and we snuck over the line,” Kennett said.

“But four points, at this stage of the season, when you come over here to play – not many teams come here and win, so it’s a good result.”

But the former Victorian premier spent more than two decades in the rough and tumble world of state politics – a far tougher world than the AFL could ever dream of being – and is ever wary of getting too carried away too early.

“You’ve got to be realistic, and there are still 20 matches left.

“We just take it one match at a time, I know that’s a bit of a cliché, but as you’ve said, to come over here and win is a good result.

“But we’ve now got to get back home, and we’ve got a few guys with a few bumps and sores and they’ve got to recover, and then we’ve got to go into it again next week.

“So it’s already history.”