Hi everyone,
Yet another glorious day for football greeted us for our clash against the best…Beauy at Jack Barker Oval.
19 players available…always going to be tough against the team that has won the past 4 premierships in this division with (what the coach told me afterwards) close to their full-strength side and their best side for the year on the park!
The messages for the day were: “Play like it’s the last game of footy you will ever play” and “Why not?” (why can’t we beat Beauy?…Believe!)
The first quarter was fantastic and showed that our intensity was up: 5 scoring shots each and we were only 5 points down at the break…unlucky with a goal to us over-ruled due to their players all convincing the umpire to question the goal umpire.
Second quarter saw the class of Beauy at their best as their spread and sure skills split us open with 5 goals to zip.
Third quarter was terrific with 6 scoring shots each. Sadly we peppered away for 2.4 while Beauy got a couple of cheap ones late, including one on the siren, to finish with 6 straight.
The last quarter saw them get another 5 but our boys never stopped trying and there were still a couple of crunching tackles laid and a great goal to Loz after a terrific passage of play and a strong mark from Franky Morris.
An 81 point loss but not disgraced and the effort from all of our boys was fantastic…unbelievably better than last week…if we approach every game like that, we have some wins (and possibly some immense upsets) on the cards very soon!
Bad luck boys but well done…I am very proud of you.
Awards:
James Hardeman: terrific game yet again with tough grunt work in the middle (& a game high 9 tackles)
Ben Marron: Great game at full-back in an onslaught…great kicking & great judgement playing on a much bigger opponent
Harry Neave: beautiful running, marking and jumping but most importantly one of the hardest and toughest games I’ve seen him play (including an “eyes on the ball” collision with Ben Marron at the end)
Campbell Tweedie: played a sterling game in an unfamiliar position in the ruck (& Happy Birthday Tweeds)
Callum Charlton: the only player to lay a legal crunching tackle on No 3 and dispossess him…and he didn’t like it!
Special mentions: Lorenzo Venturi-looked dangerous all day and finished with 2 clever goals; Josh Le Grice & Louis Butler- great to have you both back boys…class, grunt and 11 tackles between them
If we can continue to work on a few things, particularly our covering their spread to protect us on the rebound, we will start to string some wins together.
Let’s get to training and work to continue to get better.
