We tossed it around over a couple of beers and a few laughs, then a guy with a goatee sidled up to us. He said he had been listening to our conversation and was a Sydney diehard who knew how we could beat Plugger. He said his name was Joe and he was a pig farmer. He reckoned if we painted a No.4 and "Plugger" on the sides of a pig and, at a strategic time in the game, unleashed it on the SCG, it would put Plugger off his game.

We told him initially to go away but after a few more drinks the idea started to gain momentum. We got him back into the group and exchanged phone numbers. The following Wednesday, I got a call: "It's Joe, the pig farmer. I'm in Sydney and I've got the pig. Where can we put it?" I told him he was kidding, but he was locked in to making it happen, so I suggested one of my teammates, who had some history with looking after pigs. Now, I can't confirm how the pig got into the ground or who wrote the misspelt "Plugga", but I have it on pretty good authority that there was a meeting in the car park, where it was wrapped in a couple of towels and put into a training bag.

It was then smuggled past an older security guard, past whom you could just as easily have marched an army of terrorists. To this day, the parties involved are still to put up their hands. I remember standing in the middle of the ground, halfway through the second quarter, and I throught the umpire had blown half-time.

I wondered whether a player had gone down or whether it was just a short quarter. Then I looked to the right full-forward pocket and saw the pig had been let loose. The three minutes it took to capture the pig felt like about half-an-hour. Darren Holmes, who was a pretty hard-at-it half-back flanker, made a brilliant tackle on the pig in the opposite forward pocket (despite Holmes's 63 games, The Encyclopaedia of AFL footballers said the moment was his "greatest claim to fame"). After all that, Plugger didn't play and we didn't win the game. But it didn't matter, it was a funny time. You look back now and they are the sort of things you remember. You've got to have a bit of cheek and a bit of fun along the way. These days, it's probably harder for things like that to happen and for players to get their personality out. There's so much more pressure, so much more money and public scrutiny involved.

But characters still exist behind the scenes in the clubs, even though they're more careful. Though we may not hear of everything that goes on, there's still a lot of great stuff. I met Plugger the year after. I never mentioned it to him, but I know some of the other Sydney boys did and he thought it was a real compliment - he loved it.

He took it in the right spirit and thought it was fantastic (despite what he went on to write in his autobiography). I loved my time at Sydney and probably had my two most injury- free years there. I finished runner-up in the best and fairest in the first year, played state footy again and really loved it. I needed a break from Western Australia, where it was footy, footy footy - really full-on.

We had only average facilities, but the good thing about Sydney was that the playing group came from everywhere and were all thrust into a non-footy culture, where there were no outside friends. It caused us to be an extremely tight group - and that's players, wives, girlfriends, the whole lot. There's no doubt a lot of what we went through in those years formed a strong bond which holds the club in really good stead now.

We struggled on the field but, with times like the pig incident, we had a lot of fun and the foundation was being laid for the culture of a good club which led to last year's premiership. Scott Watters played 37 games in two seasons for Sydney. He also played 46 games for West Coast and 26 for Fremantle and now coaches the Subiaco colts.