DOCKERS LEGEND: What’s your standout Matthew Pavlich memory?

Leave your tribute below or tweet to @perthnow using #Pav350

HAVING lived in Perth throughout his entire 17-year career and having plans to remain here after his retirement, Matthew Pavlich can easily be claimed as an honorary West Australian.

What is more difficult ahead of Pavlich’s 350th game this Sunday is assessing where he sits among the pantheon of WA greats.

Comparing stars across different generations is always a fraught exercise. Comparing Pavlich with WA’s other legends is nigh impossible.

There’s little doubt that he belongs in the conversation, however perhaps the best place for the Fremantle great is at the top of a unique class of his own.

Because what sets Pavlich apart from some of our greatest names of the past — including Polly Farmer, Barry Cable and Bill Walker and Fremantle greats like Jack Sheedy and Stephen Michael — is his unmatched combination of durability, longevity and versatility.

Camera Icon Fremantle Docker Matthew Pavlich will play his 350th AFL match this weekend. Credit: News Corp Australia, Matthew Poon

Combining games missed through injury, suspension or resting, Pavlich has missed just 31 matches since he made his debut in Round 5, 2000. That’s an average of 1.8 games missed per season.

Listed at 192cm and 99kg in the final season of his career, the retiring 34-year-old is arguably the best utility to have played the game.

Pavlich has been whatever his coaches and team have needed him to be at the time.

He was a big-bodied midfielder before big-bodied midfielders became fashionable.

Before that, he was a defender because coach Chris Connolly needed a good kick coming out of the backline and decided a 20-year-old kid who had played 39 games was the best kick in the team.

Of all Pavlich’s personal achievements, his record of being selected as an All-Australian as a defender, midfielder and then forward is probably his most remarkable.

He won six All-Australian guernseys — in 2002, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008 — and was desperately unlucky not to have added a seventh in 2012 in Ross Lyon’s first year in charge.

That season he played much of the first half of the campaign in the midfield, before being shifted forward and kicking 55 goals in his last 13 games for a season tally of 69.

Pavlich, who was drafted from South Australia, has kicked 693 goals in his 349 games, despite spending periods of his career in the midfield and in defence.

If he can kick at least seven goals in what is likely to be four more games before saying goodbye, he will join Kevin Bartlett and Bernie Quinlan as the only players in VFL/AFL history to have completed the 350-game, 700-goal double.

The fact that he has done it by getting on a plane and travelling across the country every second weekend is extraordinary.

Pavlich is likely to finish his career on 353 games. West Coast great Dean Cox played 290 games, the second-most from a Perth-based player.

Pavlich has set a mark that might not be touched by another WA-based player in our lifetimes.

It’s a testament to Pavlich’s professionalism and strength of mind and ability to dedicate every minute of his week to the weekend’s cause.

While his place in the hearts and memories of Fremantle diehards is assured, there is some risk the game’s history won’t record his career on the same elevated platform.

Camera Icon Will Pavlich go down as one of the greatest footballers in Western Australia? Credit: Getty Images, Justine Walker/AFL Media/Getty Images

Perhaps Pavlich has always been underrated in Victoria.

He has played his entire career outside of footy’s epicentre of Melbourne, has never played in a premiership and didn’t win a Brownlow Medal.

Yet the Pavlich story is about more than an analysis of statistics, accolades and trophies. His career is also a tale of persistence, loyalty and passion for the purple cause.

As Pavlich says, he and the club have grown up together. He has been a constant. Dockers supporters in their teens and 20s have never gone to the footy and not watched him run around in the No. 29 guernsey.

There will be others running around in that No. 29 in the future. The club is always bigger than the individual.

But there has never been a more significant individual to have pulled on a Freo guernsey.