Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size Roger Federer has always had that extra fraction of a second. In cricket, the majestic Mark Waugh, too, seemed utterly unhurried when a red missile was hurled at him at 150 km/h. And, in the hectic chaos of Australian football – a game in which 36 players run in different directions and crash into one another – there is one man who appears to have considerably more time than any of his 800 AFL peers. Scott Pendlebury, the captain of Collingwood, doesn't merely have more time than other footballers. On the field, when he gets the ball, he creates an impression that the game has slowed –sometimes, even stopped. Pendlebury has been likened to the character of Neo played by Keanu Reeves in The Matrix, who can swerve around oncoming bullets as if in slow-motion while others are stuck, and struck, in normal speed. Pendlebury, an understated guy with obsessive tendencies (he used to weigh his food), isn't a mysterious, semi-reclusive personality in the mould of, say, Gary Ablett snr or Dustin Martin; nor is he an irreverent larrikin such as his old teammate Dane Swan. But if Pendlebury isn't mysterious, there is a mystery at the heart of his game – namely, what it is that he does on the field to create the impression that this most frenetic of sports has slowed down, or hit the pause button, for him? And then there is another sense in which Pendlebury is defying time: he arrives at his 300th game, Friday night's qualifying final against Geelong at the MCG, close to the peak of his freaky powers. Time's winged chariot was hurrying near him – or so we thought – last year, when a back injury saw him struggle (by his Olympian standards) in the finals series, as the Magpies fell one straight kick shy of a flag. Yet this year, his 14th in the AFL, the ex-basketballer from Sale made the AFL's All-Australian team for the sixth time. As with Federer, time has stood still for him in terms of longevity. All of which which has only served to deepen the question of what is actually happening when Pendlebury strolls around opponents, making merely subtle lateral movements. It is a phenomenon best understood from several vantages: his own perspective; the perceptions of teammates; forensic analysis by boffins; and what we, the madding crowd, see when we watch Pendlebury waft around the field, tacklers clutching at him vainly or avoiding rushing at him for fear of what he might do.


Scott Pendlebury disposes of the ball in round six against Essendon. Credit:Getty What does Pendlebury see? The Collingwood captain doesn't feel like he's slowing down the game when he has the footy. "It's normal for me. It's how I play," he says. "It's not a conscious thing that I've added to my game. I don't feel like I'm doing it. I'm sort of just trying to find the right decision." Yet Pendlebury is aware that he isn't hurried. "I don't feel like I ever have to rush. But I put that down to doing a lot of work at training." Many great sportspeople can't explain their artistry. While Pendlebury can't explain the "time warp" effect, he offers this explanation of what he tries to do with the footy: "More often than not, I'm trying to release someone into time and space to make a really good decision. There's no point me selling candy [see below] and baulking people and giving it to somebody who's hot." He describes his intentions thus: "Try and make guys around me better."


Pendlebury's mastery of skills frees him up to play strategically. Credit:Fairfax Media How does he deceive opponents? The AFL's Damian Farrow, manager of umpiring innovation and coaching, has an academic background in studying decision-making by athletes. He describes Pendlebury as "a master of deception" with the ball in his hands.

"He's expert at selling false information," says Farrow. "When he knows he's got them hooked, that's when he'll move in another direction." Pendlebury is versed in what Farrow calls “pattern recognition’’ on the field. "Selling candy," the euphemism for faking a disposal (mainly a handball) but then holding on to the ball, is one of Pendlebury's deceptions. "He usually puts it out there, like he's going to handball it," says his Collingwood teammate Steele Sidebottom. Just under six minutes remained in the final round Collingwood-Essendon game when Pendlebury roved the loose ball from a marking contest. As he moved, three Essendon players – Kyle Langford, Paddy Ambrose and Mason Redman – hung back rather than rushing at him, waiting to anticipate where Pendlebury would move.


This passage of play in round 23 exemplifies Pendlebury's style. As you can see in the video above, Pendlebury at first faked a handball. Then he changed direction, moving towards the centre corridor before faking again and standing still. Many in the 85,000-strong crowd gasped as Pendlebury – and the game – went into Matrix mode. The three Bombers were by then no longer a tackling threat. Pendlebury subsequently found a teammate with a handball that set up a shot on goal (to Jamie Elliott, who missed). Great AFL midfielders are notoriously hard to tackle. But whereas Geelong's Paddy Dangerfield and Fremantle's Nat Fyfe burst through with power, and Richmond's Dusty Martin deploys the stiff-arm fend, Pendlebury uses smaller, almost innocuous moves. "He gives off subtle cues," says David Rath, the AFL's head of game analysis, a trained biomechanist and former Hawthorn coach and analyst, who likened Pendlebury's evasive talents to Cyril Rioli, except they involve less extravagant movements. "There's an economy to his moves." The opposition does not want Pendlebury to "draw" players to him and then release a disposal to a teammate in dangerous space. Thus, as with the Essendon trio, players are sometimes reluctant to rush and tackle him. But, in turn, this holding off affords him more time to find a teammate. So, Pendlebury's reputation and the opposition's wariness of his talents arguably give him additional time.


A further quirk of Pendlebury's evasive game: he kicks with his left foot but favours his right hand when handballing. Left-footers routinely wrong-foot would-be-tacklers. Pendlebury, as he acknowledges, differs from many left-footers in that he's more willing to kick on his right boot. "I can use my opposite foot." As with Hawthorn's ex-skipper Sam Mitchell, the ability to "go both ways", left and right, affords him more time and space and compensates for moderate leg speed. When does he pull his moves? Surprisingly, Pendlebury says he doesn't try major time-and-space creative manoeuvres early in games. Like a batsman, he waits until he's confident and seen enough balls to play more enterprising shots. "Early in the games, I will do the first things that come to mind ... usually by the third or fourth quarter, I feel like I've built a fair bit of confidence. Then I might take that extra second or I might see something and say, 'If I fake that way, he might bite on that and then I can open up that kick behind him', which is a bit more damaging. I never go out there at the start and try and just go whack and do something pretty special or something cool." What do spectators see when they watch Pendlebury? Credit:Jason South What are we seeing? When Pendlebury has the ball and the game visibly slows, what the viewers – live or on television – are really seeing is a hesitation in his opponents.

"The illusion of time slowing down is best explained as the hesitation Pendlebury induces in his opponent, as the defender battles the tendency to react automatically to the subtle cues or 'tells'," Rath explained. "It's a pause in the game created by hesitation."


We're seeing an almost subconscious 'battle' between Pendlebury and the opponents who are seeking to defend him. Rath says that, as spectators, we're seeing an almost subconscious "battle" between Pendlebury and the opponents who are seeking to defend him. "The defenders who want him to commit and Pendlebury who wants them to commit." Sidebottom puts it bluntly: "I guess he puts them in two minds, and yet he just holds it [the football] ... Everything does slow down." As with other highly skilled players, Pendlebury’s mastery of the basic skills – one-touch ball-handling, kicking (both feet) and handball – allows him to direct his focus to strategic objectives. As the AFL’s Farrow explained, whereas less skilful players have to concentrate on executing the skill, Pendlebury can spend "the spare attention" on making the best decisions with the ball, or on reading the play. Scott and Alex Pendlebury. Credit:AAP What (or who) has aided his longevity? The uber-professional Pendlebury credits his wife, Alex, who has a degree in nutrition, as the driver behind him finding the right fuels for his body. At Alex's behest, he started to weigh his food when he was 22 or 23, a practice that helped him gain an understanding of "the optimal amount". While he no longer weighs food, he recently cut back on coffee, restricting himself to one cup per day in the morning. He dives into the cold water of his pool at home every morning, and he wears an Oura finger band that measures the quality, duration, efficiency, and REM proportion of his sleep. He trains with the finger band, which gauges other factors such as heart rate, too. "Most of the nutrition stuff I learned from her," Pendlebury says of Alex, who counselled the younger Scott against lollies post-dinner, and "fat free" foods dosed with sugar. Several years ago, Pendlebury and Gary Ablett jnr went to Gatorade headquarters in Florida and underwent a treadmill test that Pendlebury said "broke down what your body runs on". He found that he would burn fat quickly. "I knew I could up my fat going into games." He adjusted his diet to include more avocado and olive oil. Ex-basketballer Scott Pendlebury in his early football days. Credit:Sebastian Costanzo What part has basketball played in Pendlebury’s game? Pendlebury’s excellence at basketball was such that he was offered a scholarship to the Australian Institute of Sport, spurning that opportunity in favour of footy. His spot in the AIS was serendipitously grabbed by Patty Mills, who has had a celebrated career in the NBA and as an Australian Boomer. In the early 2000s, an AFL research project posed the question of how footballers fare when they’ve played other "invasion" sports in childhood. It found that a background in those sports assisted the development of footballers, and that, as Farrow puts it, "basketball was No.1 on the list". Farrow says basketball has been found to assist footballers’ "composure in traffic and awareness in contests" – traits that almost define Scott Pendlebury’s timeless style. "I don’t know if it’s from basketball, or it’s how I see the game," says Pendlebury. For a footballer with acute awareness of those around him on the field, what he eats, drinks and how he sleeps, there are still parts of Scott Pendlebury that remain inexplicable, even to him.