Each year it comes around and like clockwork, when the Bulldogs take on Essendon, minds drift back to the famous encounter in Round 21, 2000 and the ‘Chris Grant goal’ that spoilt the Bombers’ quest for the perfect season.

The Dons were nigh on invincible that year, but the Dogs got them, thanks largely to something that became known as the ‘super-flood’. A fortnight previous they’d managed to break Carlton’s 13-game win streak by dropping an extra man back in defence, but no one was prepared for that was to come next.

Still a high school student at Footscray City College, a young Robert Murphy was playing his third game that day, and this week on the Freedom in a Cage podcast, he recounted the ‘bizarre’ plot to take down the high-flying Bombers.

“I was a young naive kid and Terry Wallace pulls out the ‘super-flood’ in the team meaning,” he recalled in an episode set to drop on Thursday.  

“I was sharp enough to realise ‘this is big’, this is a football… not a revolution, but this will be radical.  No team has every started a game with fourteen players behind the ball, or twelve players, or whatever it was.  This is not how it usually goes.”

But it worked.  The Essendon forwards were choked by the sheer crowd of Dogs in their space, and Chris Grant would effectively seal the deal with 90 seconds to play, ending the Dons’ dream run and securing Round 21, 2000’s place in history.  

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