How does Scott Pendlebury stop time?

Roger Federer 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, a Collingwood icon, 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, or hit the pause button, for him?

Just as cameras from various angles capture Reeves in The Matrix in scenes of thrilling variable-speed action, so is the on-field phenomenon of Pendlebury best understood from several vantages: his own perspective; forensic analysis by boffins; the perception of a teammate; and what we, the madding crowd, see when we watch him waft around the field, tacklers clutching at him vainly or avoiding rushing at him for fear of what he might do.

What does this phenomenon tell us about how modern footy is played? Do sportspeople in other codes share this gift? And what does the champion say himself?

What does Pendlebury perceive on the field?

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, he 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. “You can’t explain what it’s like to score a goal to someone who’s never done it,” said the late George Best, the notorious Northern Irish soccer genius. While Pendlebury can’t account for the “time warp” effect, he offers this explanation: “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.”

‘I never go out there at the start and try and just go whack and do something pretty special or something cool.’

Scott Pendlebury

In short, he describes his intentions thus: “Try and make guys around me better.”

Surprisingly, Pendlebury says he doesn’t try major time-and space creative manoeuvres early in games either. Like a batsman, he waits until he’s confident and has 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.”

How do experts explain the time-warp effect?

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 in 2019 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, to anticipate where Pendlebury would go next.

This passage of play in round 23 of 2019 exemplifies Pendlebury’s style.

As you can see in the video above, Pendlebury at first fakes a handball. Then he changes direction, gliding towards the centre corridor before faking again and standing still. Many in the 85,000-strong crowd gasp as Pendlebury – and the game – go into Matrix mode. The three Bombers are by then no longer a tackling threat. Pendlebury subsequently finds a teammate with a handball that sets 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. There’s an economy to his moves.’

David Rath

“He gives off subtle cues,” says David Rath, the AFL’s former head of game analysis, a trained biomechanist and also 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.

And then there is the legacy of years spent playing another sport. The calibre of Pendlebury’s basketball skills was such that he was offered a scholarship to the Australian Institute of Sport (AIS). He spurned that opportunity in favour of footy but his spot in the AIS was serendipitously grabbed by Patty Mills, who has had a celebrated career in the National Basketball Association 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 – games such as soccer, the rugby codes, basketball and hockey, which involve invading the opposition’s territory. It found that a background in those sports assisted the development of footballers and that, as Farrow puts it, “basketball was number one on the list”. Farrow says basketball has been found to help footballers’ “composure in traffic and awareness in contests” – traits that almost define Pendlebury’s timeless style. Interestingly, Federer also played basketball and various other sports as a kid.

Why does it look to us as if the game has switched to slow motion?

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.”

‘I guess he puts them in two minds ... Everything does slow down.’

Steele Sidebottom

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 soccer’s Lionel Messi, the late Sharne Warne in his legspinning pomp and fellow AFL midfield architects such as Marcus Bontempelli, 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 explains, whereas less skilful players have to concentrate on executing their skills, Pendlebury can spend “the spare attention” on making the best decisions with the ball, or on reading the play.

How does this phenomenon apply to other athletes?

“In football, the person with more time evades his opponents,” says Dr Machar Reid, Tennis Australia’s head of innovation. Federer, conversely, uses the extra time at his disposal to reduce the time of his opponent to play shots. Whereas Rafael Nadal will stand well behind the baseline, Federer uses time to take the ball early and play with more aggression. “Individuals [in tennis] who have more time take it away from their opponents,” says Reid.

Lindsay Gaze, the godfather of Australian basketball and coach of the Australian Boomers in four Olympic Games, uses the analogy of a chess master such as Bobby Fischer for elite players – of different sports – who have the capacity to read what will happen early. “He [Fischer] saw the game three or four moves ahead,” says Gaze, who theorises that Pendlebury, like Gaze’s own basketball champion son, Andrew, has that chessmaster’s knack for seeing what might unfold.

‘I don’t know if it’s from basketball or it’s how I see the game.’

Scott Pendlebury

There is another sense in which Pendlebury has defied time: he has been close to the peak of his freaky powers for longer than comparable footballers. Time’s winged chariot was hurrying near him back in 2018 – or so we thought – 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 in 2019, his fourteenth season in the AFL, the meticulous man from Sale in country Victoria who wears an activity tracker to bed, made the AFL’s All Australian team for the sixth time, and continued to thrive in 2020.

“I don’t know if it’s from basketball or it’s how I see the game,” says Pendlebury on the source of his gift. 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.

This explainer was first published on September 4, 2019.