When the first person to arrive from the opposition was 6’3″ things weren’t off to a good start. The good news was he was by far the Waverley Hawks tallest player – and there were only 14 more. So on the massive expanses of Boss James it was going to be 15 vs 15 with us having two reserves. This sounded promising until you remember that 8 of our 17 players had just broken the speed limit to get from Mordialloc to the Boss 5 mins before the game started.
There was a decent wind so it was always going to be a good coin toss to win. We kicked with the breeze in the first quarter but Waverley kicked the first 2 goals of the game in quick succession and things weren’t looking good. It took a while but we finally clicked into gear as our runners started moving. It started with a beautiful passage of play out of the centre from Jack Tuffley to Will Tuffley to Presley to Zach Zeising. Then Angus took a couple of good marks and goaled x2, both Tuffley’s kicked one and Benjo also chimed in. Quarter time we had a healthy 35-13 lead.
Second quarter we were into the wind and their big marking full forward took some telling marks and kicked accurately. Then they got a few easy goals over the back. Our plan of kicking the ball over our half forwards and having them run onto the ball was going OK but we kicked 3 points early on that could of been goals. A late goal to Jack Tuffley had us down 53-44 at half time.
The third quarter started well with Toby and Zach doing well in the ruck and marking everything around the ground – Ethan and Jamie getting a lot of the ball and delivering to a man. After a sustained few minutes of locking it in our forward line Jack K snapped one out of a pack. Unfortunately we then kicked 5 points straight and only a late goal to Angus gave us a defendable lead at 3 quarter time 70-60.
We started the last quarter well with 5 mins of sustained attack but we suddenly ran out of legs (which given the number of kids that played 2 games was not surprising) – the rest of the quarter was one way traffic and the final score was a loss 15-9 99 to 9-16 70. The number of scoring shots was in our favour but inaccuracy on the score board cost us. The game was a great spectacle – with the lead changing each quarter and the final score probably doesn’t do us justice.
