The momentum had been with the Giants as the three-quarter time siren loomed, but against the flow of play, the Bulldogs had worked the ball into their forward line.
In the chaos of play the ball bounces agonisingly between two players, the Giants’ Ryan Griffen and Bulldogs’ Clay Smith.
Neither player takes a backward step as they both commit to the contest and smash into each other with the crack of bone and flesh.
Clay gets the better of the contest and the ball is shunted to Caleb Daniel and he snaps a goal.
The Bulldogs are back in it. They go on to win the nail-biting finish and the Club enters its first Grand Final in 55 years.
Has there been a more enthralling contest than the Bulldogs and Giants preliminary final in 2016?
LISTEN: FREEDOM IN A CAGE | THE CLAY SMITH INTERVIEW
Clay Smith was the match winner for the Bulldogs that night with 26 possessions, eight tackles and four goals, one behind. What a night to play the game of your life.
The Clay Smith story is glorious, inspiring, but painful.
He burst onto the scene at the kennel by splitting Daniel Giansiracusa’s perfect nose open during a tackling drill. It was his first day at the Club.
In his first game against the West Coast Eagles in Round 1 of 2012 he kicked four goals before exiting the game early with a full body cramp.
Clay’s football road was not an easy one. Three knee reconstructions in four years gives you some sense of the trauma he endured in his seven years in the game, but it doesn’t capture the emotional toll it must’ve taken on the young gun.
Clay was drafted to the Bulldogs with pick 17 in the 2011 draft from the Gippsland Power. He seemed to me then as a classic footy club kid.
He’d grown up in football club locker rooms, kicking rolled up ankle tape through doorways after the senior players had discarded it. Clay’s natural environment, the place he thrived, was from inside the pack of a football team where winning was life and death and having a laugh was taken just as seriously.
The knee injuries that eventually brought an abrupt end to his football career left a few scars, but to share a locker room with Clay for some years was to watch the game break his heart over and over again.
Knee reconstructions physically hurt for a little while, but it is the loneliness that lingers. Clay suffered as much loneliness as any Bulldogs player before him.
His teammates and the Club did as much as they could to give him shelter from the storm, but the hits to the soul took their toll.
55 games just weren’t enough for a player with as much ability and will as Clay, but he retires as a premiership player.
Of course, there will be moments of bitterness or resentment when he looks back on his time in the game, but I hope he allows himself to see his achievements in the same light that the rest of us see them.
His best football was full of heart and generosity, he was a big part of the spirit of that historical Bulldogs team.
We will forever be in his debt for what he gave the Club in its hour of need. Forever a Bulldog hero, it doesn't get much better than that.
