Another bright and sunny day greeted the Under 16s for their game against Aspley at their fantastic Graham Road facilities. This was a danger game for us as Aspley are always a competitive group and with no Division 1 game over the weekend, their Division 2s playing on the Friday night and no Under 14 game either they had a full roster to choose from, in fact their coach was telling me they had 26 turn up wanting to play!. We, on the other hand, had 21 with 7 unavailable through injury or illness. Yep this would really rest our depth and so it proved throughout the game.
Our warm up I thought was pretty good and all the boys seemed pretty focussed on the job at hand, trouble was obviously so was Aspley who really threw everything at us in the first quarter. They kicked with the breeze first and despite their competitiveness around the ground they may have felt like they didn’t really capitalize on it as they only kicked the 2 goals for the quarter. We didn’t kick any at all but we had our chances, 4 behinds for the quarter was all we could muster. Generally it wasn’t a great quarter, our effort and intensity was there (13 tackles!) but we were very fumbly and indecisive with the ball in hand and we didn’t use it well going forward. Plenty of talk about that at the break.
The second quarter was much more like the footy we have started to play over the last few weeks. Missing in the first quarter was the handball and teamwork but that really lifted in the second quarter and as a result we were able to break the game open with plenty of run, cleaner hands and some penetrating kicking with the breeze into our forward 50. We kicked 6 to none in this quarter and really broke the game open. We worked harder on cutting down Aspley’s run and uncontested possessions and finally won a free kick count (ok it was 3 to 4 but we haven’t seen much of that of late) which helped curb their possession style footy. The half time chat was reinforcement of what we had done well that quarter and urging them not to let the work ethic drop as Aspley were the type of free running team that could take full advantage of that.
Kicking into the breeze in the 3rd it was imperative that we didn’t let them close the gap too much and so make their job too hard kicking into the breeze in the last quarter. It was pleasing to see the effort through the 3rd quarter was still there and whilst it wasn’t always attractive footy in this term we got the job done by restricting them to just the one goal and managing to win the quarter by 2 points. That doesn’t seem too much but the breeze was quite prominent and definitely worth about 3 goals so that was a great result for us. Once again we had our chances to kick more but the tricky wind proved a bit much and we could only manage 1-4 giving us 1-8 into the breeze for the game. If that was 8-1 it’s game over.
Aspley certainly never gave in and continued to make us work really hard for the rest of the game, 3 late goals by us blew the score out a little and it was certainly no reflection on how hard the game was, there were certainly some sore boys at training last night. Overall I think it was a pretty good result for us considering Aspley are always a competitive side and they are always a bit of an unknown depending on who they have available. For us to come away with a solid win without the likes of Jack Mackey, Caleb and Lachy who have all been terrific this year, along with Adam (our full back who was extremely hard to replace), Omar, Jai and Callum was a great effort. Everyone stood up and played their role and had a hand in the win.
Best players as I said everyone did their bit but I would be surprised if skipper Matt didn’t get 30 touches, Jack Taylor wasn’t far behind, Jared Denny’s work rate at chf was exceptional, Mitch played his best game for the year and Liam with 8 tackles and a couple of goals was awesome. Ryan and Jayden in tandem in the ruck and makeshift full back were busy all day and Jack Leahy despite having little energy after being sick all week contested hard up forward, presented as a target all day and finished with 3 hard earned goals. Plenty of others did plenty of good things during the game as well so once again well done everyone.
Final scores Springwood 11-14-80 def Aspley 4-4-28
Goalkickers Jack Leahy 3, Jared 2, Liam Eddy 2, Mitch Osland 1, Brandon Lynch 1, Corbin Wieben1, Matt Leadbeater 1
So now we turn our attention to Kedron Mayne, another really good side who have recently come down from a higher division. This promises to be a ripper game and one that could really define our season so let’s all look forward to this challenge and work hard at improving at training. A lot of things we have to clean up from the Aspley game and the best place to start doing that is at training so see you all there.
Cheers
Steve
Last Modified on 28/05/2013 10:17