Super-Flood

The Super-Flood is the unofficial title given to the round 21, 2000 match between Australian Football League (AFL) clubs Essendon and Western Bulldogs, which was played at Colonial Stadium on Friday, 28 July 2000.

In a major upset, the Western Bulldogs employed a strong zone flooding defence to win the match by eleven points, and inflicted Essendon's first and only defeat of the 2000 calendar year.

Essendon's opponent was the sixth-placed Western Bulldogs, entering the game with an 11–9 win–loss record and able to secure a finals berth with a win.

Bulldogs coach Terry Wallace devised a plan, later to become known as the "super-flood", which involved most of his players flooding the Essendon forward 50 in an attempt to negate the Bombers attack.

At the time, Australian rules football was largely a positional game, so the sight of as many as 14 of the Bulldogs' 18 players occupying the defensive half of the ground was unusual.

[3] Wallace also did his best to mislead the opposition in the lead-up, publicly telling reporters about the need to kick goals because he didn't expect "a 12-goal game similar to the Carlton one", while secretly training for the super-flood gameplan at Chirnside Park in Werribee rather than in the open sessions at the Bulldogs' home ground Whitten Oval.

The teams traded behinds for a while, and Brad Johnson made a retaliatory strike to the back of John Barnes' head in a marking contest, although no further incident was sparked by it.

With two minutes remaining and the margin one point, Nathan Eagleton took a wide-angle set shot which went across the face of goal and fell in the right forward pocket; and, in the ground contest that followed, Essendon full-back Dustin Fletcher accidentally toe-poked the ball out of bounds on the full; from the free kick, Grant ran around on the angle and kicked the goal to put the Bulldogs five points ahead.

[7] When the final siren sounded, Brad Johnson made a direct line to hurl abuse at John Barnes, before he and the other players shook hands in the usual way.

The club would struggle in the ensuing years, with Wallace resigning as coach with one round remaining in the 2002 season, followed by claiming the wooden spoon in 2003.

The win was one of two upset victories which established Terry Wallace's reputation as a master tactician across his coaching career.