The Super-Flood is the unofficial title given to the round 21, 2000 match between Australian Football League (AFL) clubs and , which was played at Colonial Stadium on Friday, 28 July 2000. Essendon went into the match having won its first twenty games of the home-and-away season, needing five more wins to complete the league's first perfect season. In a major upset, the Western Bulldogs employed a strong zone flooding defence to win the match by eleven points, and inflicted Essendon's first and only defeat of the 2000 calendar year. Background With twenty consecutive wins to start the twenty-two match 2000 AFL season, Essendon had already secured the season's minor premiership and top seeding by the time it faced the Western Bulldogs at Colonial Stadium. It now needed only two more wins to finish with a 22–0 record and become the first club since in 1929 to complete an undefeated home-and-away season, and five more wins to complete a perfect season for the first time in VFL/AFL history. Its active twenty game winning streak was the second-longest in VFL/AFL history, only three wins short of Geelong's all-time record of 23 wins, set in 1952–1953. Essendon's opponent was the sixth-placed , entering the game with an 11–9 win–loss record and able to secure a finals berth with a win. Bulldogs coach Terry Wallace devised a plan, later to become the "super-flood", which involved most of his players flooding the Essendon forward 50 in an attempt to negate the Bombers attack. He had executed a similar game plan two weeks earlier against a second-placed team which entered the game on a thirteen-game winning streak: by deploying a loose man in defence to stifle scoring, the Bulldogs won a low-scoring game 11.9 (75) d. 11.6 (72), with what was the second-lowest winning score by any team for the 2000 season. Wallace decided to implement a more extreme version of the same plan against the Essendon. At the time, Australian rules football was largely a positional game, so the sight of as many as 14 of the Bulldogs' 18 players occupying the defensive half of the ground was unusual. Wallace also did his best to mislead the opposition in the lead-up, publicly telling reporters about the need to kick goals because he didn't expect "a 12-goal game similar to the Carlton one", while secretly training for the super-flood gameplan at Chirnside Park in Werribee