Liza Pendlebury could hardly believe what her son was doing.

For the first time she could remember on Christmas Day, her ultra-disciplined son and Collingwood champion, Scott, was digging into the creamy scalloped potatoes.

Finally, she thought, he was treating himself to some trimmings.

For two decades, the man who on Saturday night will become only the sixth player to notch 400 VFL/AFL games has been a strictly salad-and-lean-meat man, even on Christmas Day.

The dessert and cheesy carbs have been off limits for the whole of his adult life.

That discipline and incredible commitment is what has powered the dual premiership superstar to become one of the greatest players in the game’s history, culminating with the finest 30 minutes of his career steering Collingwood to another flag with a brilliant last term in last year’s Grand Final.

When he crumpled to the turf on the final siren, Pendlebury’s parents saw a joyous relief and a rare level of emotion for someone who has always been so pragmatic and so composed from the day he first learned to ride a bike.

But it was two Christmases ago back in Gippsland that the champion onballer finally shocked his mother at lunch.

“He says he loves my cooking, but even at Christmas he would just eat the meat and ask for a Greek salad. Without any dressing,” Liza Pendlebury said.

“He is so disciplined with it and wouldn’t shift. That is just how committed he is.

“But two years ago I thought ‘Oh my God’. It’s taken 18 years but he’s finally eating the potatoes.

“Afterwards he said to me ‘Have you got any more of that stuff?’

“Luckily, I had made a second tray.”

For the loving and sports-mad family from Sale, their middle son of three boys who turned his back on a professional basketball career when he was 17 to try his hand at footy has always been “built different”.

They knew it as a teen, when Pendlebury would stick post-it notes on his bedroom mirror about making the Australian world championship basketball team, and when he asked his mother to rebound 1000 basketball shots at 6am before school, and when he took the clipboard off his junior basketball coach late in the game in the under 12s.

“He grabbed the clipboard off his coach, Jo Crawford, and said ‘This (game plan) isn’t working. This is how it is going to work’,” Liza said.

“He said ‘Righto boys, we need to do this’.

“The coach, who is a close family friend of ours, came over and said I’m intimidated by Scott.

“We said ‘He doesn’t mean it, it is just the way he thinks’. He sees the game before it happens.

“He was 12 at the time”.

But family has changed and relaxed Scott, 36, in ways that have helped enhance his footy career, marrying wife Alex, and raising their two children, Jax, seven, and Darcy, four.

In recent years, half a midweek wine was occasionally OK when there was a decent break between games.

School pick-ups and coaching his son’s junior basketball games have replaced the old seven-day-a-week beach recovery sessions. His intensive preparations softened, if only slightly.

“He has relaxed and he needed to,” Liza said. “It is good for him.”

It was on the morning of the Grand Final last year when Scott was having a kick with his son in his backyard that Jax gave his dad some golden advice.

When you are having a shot, Jax said to his father, make sure you point your toe and line it up with the goals.

And in the third quarter, with the game balanced on a knife’s edge, Scott nailed the dead eye set shot from 35m out on an angle to give the Magpies the ascendancy.

He looked up to his son’s position in the crowd, as an MCG full of Collingwood fans went nuts. Then came the trademark double fist pump.

His mum said she cried many times before the game had even finished.

They knew how much their son wanted another cup and everything he had sacrificed through good times and bad at Collingwood.

There were the two grand final losses in 2011 and 2018, the finals drought in between, the career-threatening back injury and surgery, and then playing away from his young family in Covid-19.

It has been a rollercoaster ride, and when things have hit the fan a bit like this week, Pendlebury has been the rock of Gibraltar, the heartbeat. The reliable one. The captain. The one who slowed time and couldn’t be tackled.

The man who, quite seriously, bounced the Sherrin off a pigeon without breaking stride on a run through the middle of the MCG.

But he always wanted more than one flag.

And coach Craig McRae took the Magpies on a magic carpet ride in 2023, ‘taking the steps’ towards another shot at premiership glory.

It had been 13 years since Pendlebury last hoisted the cup, and for one of the most driven, consistent and precise footballers the game has seen, team success always trumped his cupboard full of individual accolades including five Copeland Trophies, six All-Australian blazers and three Anzac Day medals.

So Grand Final day last year was a big one for the Pendlebury family.

“I woke up at 7.30am and had a beer,” Scott’s dad Bruce said.

“It was pretty tense. I had four beers before 10.30am and I thought ‘I better pull up here I need to watch the game’.”

And that is when it happened.

Scott grabbed the clipboard again, metaphorically speaking.

Not only did the No. 10 produce a mesmerising last quarter, hitting targets which others may not have even seen, he marshalled the troops in a way that drew universal acclaim from the most respected analysts and champions of the game.

Privately, the Brisbane Lions believe the difference in last year’s flag triumph was Pendlebury’s leadership, shaping the defence and pointing out passes for teammates, as Collingwood managed the big moments better than the visitors.

It happened all finals series.

And while Scott claimed the 2010 Norm Smith Medal with a blinding performance in the Grand Final replay win over St Kilda 14 years ago, the last quarter of last year’s Grand Final was the finest moment of a legendary career, according to his dad.

Bruce Pendlebury clung to the edge of his seat for those three hours in last year’s Grand Final.

Bruce has spent his adult life working offshore on barges two weeks a time as a rigger and scaffolder, laying oil and gas pipelines.

The time away from his family, including his two other sons Kris and Ryan, has been incredibly “tough going” at times, Bruce said, watching on from afar for two weeks a month.

But this week, Bruce said he was quitting work if he wasn’t allowed to come back to Melbourne to celebrate Scott’s 400th game against Carlton at a packed-out MCG.

But that last quarter against the Lions last year was something else. And Bruce and Liza Pendlebury’s eyes were locked on their son the whole time.

“I just thought ‘Wow, have a look at him’,” Bruce Pendlebury said.

“I thought this is above and beyond what I have seen before.

“You don’t see too many people doing what he was doing.

“He was going outside of himself the whole time, rallying the troops and encouraging them to get there or do this.

“In big games, you can be left to your own devices but you could see him talking the whole time saying ‘This is what we are going to do’.

“Even with young Nick Daicos saying should I step out for that late centre clearance, Scott said ‘What, don’t you want to be a part of this?

“Just the awareness. It was a massive individual effort on the day that I saw.

“You can see when the game was finished and he laid on the ground. The emotion just poured out of him.

“You could see the relief for him was massive. It was someone who had given so much to that footy club.

“I’m fortunate as a father to have three boys, but for him to do something special like that on the day, it was something else.

“Our other boys say the same thing. He’s pretty special.”

The secrets behind Pendlebury the player

– Josh Barnes

It’s a quintessential Scott Pendlebury play.

It is Anzac Day, 2014 and the Collingwood great receives a handball hemmed against the boundary with four Essendon jumpers boxing him in.

Unfazed, Pendlebury fakes a handball and the Dons stand still.

Always moving his head to see what is afield, he next shapes to kick and two Bombers lunge at him.

That lunge is a fatal mistake – the Magpie steps inside through a gap and suddenly has enough time to take a bounce and lope up the field untouched.

The Bombers shake their heads and turn to chase, while 91,731 fans wonder how on earth the champion slipped away, seemingly with so much ease.

It would surprise nobody who has watched Pendlebury’s first 399 games that no player has ever dodged more opponents.

According to Champion Data, Pendlebury has registered 76 baulks in his career, more than any other player since the stat began.

A baulk is defined as when a “defensive player is beaten and evaded by the ball carrier without making physical contact”.

Where powerhouse midfielders like Patrick Dangerfield have taken on tacklers and burst through with sheer force, or brutes like Dustin Martin have simply stiff-armed opponents out of the way, Pendlebury sits alone as the king of simply not being touched.

It is the Magpie’s magic power: slipping away and leaving opponents forlornly grasping at air.

Watch him in heavy traffic and it seems like the world has slowed down, even if the great said this week he doesn’t feel like he is moving at a different speed.

Opponents rush past him or freeze on the spot as he picks his way through like a submarine silently gliding behind enemy lines.

One of the finest tacklers of his generation, St Kilda great Lenny Hayes admitted he was fooled often by the latest member of the 400-game club.

He said that the Collingwood champ’s “awareness in traffic is almost unrivalled in the modern era”.

“No doubt his basketball background has played a part in this but if you watch him closely he is always turning his head or scanning what is around,” Hayes said.

“When he gets the ball, because he has scanned, he knows where the opposition and his teammates are. This gives him an extra second to make a decision.”

Australian Catholic University biomechanist Michael Cole – who gave evidence on behalf of Magpie Brayden Maynard in his blockbuster tribunal case last year – put it down to situational awareness.

In simple terms, Pendlebury knows quicker than most who is around him, where they are moving and how to use that to his advantage.

Cole believes Pendlebury has “incredible agility” and “is able to rapidly change his body’s direction and/or velocity, which undoubtedly contributes to his ability to shrug tackles and evade opposition players”.

But it is amazing ability to scan the field in an instant that opens up the gaps.

“It’s unlikely to be his agility that gives us spectators the impression he is moving ‘in slow motion’,” Cole said.

“Rather, this would largely reflect his very well-developed ability to, in real time, distinguish relevant and meaningful elements in the playing environment … understand their meaning in the contest of the specific moment in time and space and accurately predict how a specific situation will unfold.”

Pendlebury has never had the burst of speed that defines some modern greats but his mind has always been a step ahead.

“I was lucky enough to play with a guy called Nigel Lappin who had a similar ability to stop time … or create more time for himself,” Pies coach Craig McRae said.

“He (Pendlebury) doesn’t have great leg speed … but he is able to create so much time and space.”

Few make the right decisions as often as the five-time Copeland Trophy winner and his first AFL coach Mick Malthouse recognised that in his first year and though “he wasn’t going to get touched”.

Sydney great Jude Bolton retired with the most tackles to his name – until Hayes went past him, a record that Pendlebury now owns.

Bolton said that opponents quickly recognised Pendlebury’s brilliant creative handballing, so would-be tacklers have long been hesitant to charge at him and allow him to release fellow Magpies into space.

That contributes to the look of opponents seeming to freeze like Pendlebury has put them under arrest around a stoppage.

Where others would make a big show of ‘selling candy’ with handballs, the six-time All-Australian Magpie has more subtle movements, which causes sticks the feet of defenders to the grass.

“Since he started in the AFL, Pendlebury has been so creative and damaging with his hands, that it made you hesitate on closing his space,” Bolton said.

“This meant by feigning to handball, he had often just found an exit from a stoppage and just parted the seas of opposition mids.”

Hayes won the Norm Smith Medal in the 2010 drawn grand final, with Pendlebury claiming the award a week later in the replay.

One of the most admired players of his generation, the Saints legend was known for his ability to pick where a player was going and nail him in a tackle.

But even he remains in awe of the small hand movements that buys Pendlebury time.

“When he has the ball he quite often holds the ball out in a handballing motion, he sells the cue that he is going to give it off and the opposition will sit off reading where the handball is going to go,” Hayes said.

“That gives him another second to make the decision.”

The combination of agility, situational awareness and that ability to fake the handball and buy time is a package that has fooled opponents over and over as they try to lay a glove on Pendlebury.

“Ultimately this ability to accurately predict how a specific situation will unfold gives the impression that a player has more time to act than others,” Cole said.

“Remember, all of this is happening in real time and in an incredibly complicated environment, which makes the act all the more impressive.”