This game was Shane Parker's 200th game of AFL football, so depsite the forecast of rain and possible hail, I was determined to be at the MCG for the game. In fact, the day turned out to be fine and even sunny for the most part, so it wasn't as much of a hardship as I had expected. Carlton had lost nine games straight before this one, but Freo's form coming into the game wasn't much better. For Freo, a loss would have meant the end of any finals aspirations for the year, not to mention the embarrassment of being the third side to lose to Carlton this year.

Freo started the game by winning the ball out of the centre and straight down to Sandilands, who inexplicably decided to handball away, with the final result being a point. Carlton worked the ball down their end, where they were paid a dodgy free kick and scored the first goal of the game. Freo came back though, with a goal that can only be described as coming from "Route 1 Football": Longmuir took the ball out of the ruck and kicked long to Pavlich who marked and goaled. From that point on, Carlton were never in front. Freo piled on 8 goals for the quarter, including four to Pavlich, but the highlight of the quarter came when Parker scored his 10th goal in league footy.

The second quarter started out the way the first quarter ended, with McPharlin goaling early on. Sandilands was rucking and actually looking pretty reasonable, but Carlton were missing French and DeLuca through injury, so at one stage Sandilands was rucking against Whitnall. Unfortunately Sandilands broke his nose part way through the quarter, otherwise he might have had a real day out. I'm not sure if it was related to Sandilands going off, but Carlton gradually began to win some centre clearances, and started to look liking they were coming back into it. Freo scored the last couple of goals for the quarter, and were 35 points up at half time.

Just before half time the clouds rolled in, and the lights went on. There was a light misting of rain during the break, but the sun came back before too long. The rain must have been enough to scare the Freo players though, because Carlton came out and dominated the first part of the third quarter. Fortunately, the quality of play had dropped off on both sides, and Carlton weren't able to get any goals on the board. The deadlock was finally broken at the 10 minute mark when Crowley scored his 4th goal for the day. Carlton scored the next two goals, but Freo finished off the quarter with 3 more to open up a 46 point lead at three-quarter time.

Denis Pagan spent most of the three-quarter time break talking to Fevola, who had been Shane's man all game. Fev was horribly out of form last week, when his contribution to the team was 2 frees against. This week he was definitely better, but he hadn't managed to trouble the scorers in three quarters, and he had taken a rest during the third.

The final quarter started pretty brightly, with Pavlich kicking two goals to get himself to 8. At about that stage Fevola got shifted into the backline. Fev obviously thought he was going to be playing on Pavlich, but that was clearly news to Whitnall, who was already playing on Pav. After a bit of messing about, Fev wound up playing on Murphy, who was playing full forward while McPharlin had a rest.

The rest of the game was a little depressing. Carlton easily out-played Freo over that period. Parker played on Waite, who managed to score 2.2 and had a fifth shot for goals rushed through for a behind. So while it was true that Parker outscored Fevola, he didn't outscore his opponent for the day. It might sound like I am getting arrogant, but it was disappointing to see Freo not really going all out for a percentage boost, particularly since if Freo win enough games between now and the end of the season, the finals spots will get most likely be decided on percentage.

Freo had a few opportunities to attack, but on two occasions good marks were disallowed and free kicks paid against other Freo players who had been vaguely in the area. To be honest they were probably frees, but it was frustrating. On another couple of occasions it seemed that the Freo players were targetting Pav instead of looking for the best option. The game finished with Pav finally taking a mark on his own and kicking his ninth goal from about 40 metres out, pretty much in front of where I was sitting.

This list of the best players includes most of the usual suspects: Pavlich, Longmuir, Parker, Black; along with a couple of players who had probably been a bit down on form: Shammer and Josh Carr. The nice thing was that you could add some of the younger guys to that list: Mundy, Peake, Crowley spring to mind. But for a winning team there was also, in my mind a long list of players who didn't contribute much, and there were some big names on it too. Medhurst, Headland and Schofield were all big name players who didn't seem to do much. Murphy and Michael Johnson were also pretty quiet, but they are still young enough to be forgiven for it.

Final Score : Fremantle 24.8-152 beat Carlton 17.15-117

© 2005 timnfromoz timnfromoz@hotmail.com

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