Preliminary finals are not the sort of occasions where malicious acts take place.

Those acts have traditionally been saved for the following week on Grand Final day where the only repercussion on players’ minds is the feeling of a premiership opportunity lost.

Yet in the 1965 VFL preliminary final between arch-rivals Collingwood and Essendon, an off-the-ball act occurred which caused so much outrage it sparked an investigation from Victoria Police.

Nine minutes into the first quarter, Dons forward John Somerville was found motionless forty metres behind play. Standing next to him was his direct opponent Duncan Wright, who nonchalantly gazed directly back into the play.

In amazing circumstances, no one saw the incident given how far away from the play it had occurred, but it was evident from Somerville’s gruesome facial injuries that something had occurred.

First on the scene was soon-to-be premiership captain Ken Fraser, who recounted the moment he assessed the condition of his teammate.

“I heard the roar go up. I went across to John because the ball had gone up the other end and lifted him very gently because I didn’t know whether he’d hurt his neck but I just lifted him enough to see there was blood pouring out of his mouth and his eyes were glazed – you could see he’d been knocked out and whacked across the face,” Fraser said on historical podcast Fabric of the Essendon Football Club.

“I waved at the trainers and the umpires to stop the game."

While his mind was initially on the welfare of Somerville, the realisation of playing in a cut-throat finals game quickly refocused Fraser’s mentality.

His biggest concern was having an incident as horrific as this one occur so early in game that it would potentially throw off his teammates who would be eager to even the ledger and take out Wright.

Fraser said he was loathe to let that happen, given any distraction away from playing the ball into playing the man would hurt his side’s chances of making it through to another Grand Final.

“The 1958 Grand Final when Melbourne and Collingwood played off was sort of really strongly etched in my mind,” Fraser said.

“in ’58, Melbourne were by far the superior team. Collingwood however got really stuck into them, hammered and belted them so Melbourne got really sucked in and played the man and lost the main purpose of winning the ball, in which Collingwood surprisingly won that game.

“With that in my mind, we’re not going to do what Melbourne did so I’ve gone around to as many players as I could, looked them in the eye and said “don’t get sucked in, we’ve got to go for the ball. Play the ball, we’ve got to win on the scoreboard so don’t try and even up, we’ll even up by winning the game”.”

Fraser’s inspired word proved the tonic, as Essendon smashed the Pies to advance to the decider, where it secured the club’s 12^th premiership from fourth position - the first club to do since the Bombers in 1949.

Following the preliminary final, Wright was interviewed by police, but due to insufficient eyewitness accounts, no charges were laid.

Somerville would spend two nights in hospital and play a further 28 games for the Dons across two more seasons.

Fabric of the Essendon Football Club is a weekly 20-episode series powered by Liberty, featuring in-depth chats between club historian Dan Eddy and 20 of the club’s most adored names across multiple decades. You can listen via Spotify, Google Podcasts and Apple Podcasts.