Grand Final day. Not sure who was more nervous, the kids or parents. Although we’d beaten St Peters already this year, they were buoyed by the return of their two best players – D. Fountain, a hard running, high marking ruckman; and George Wardlaw, a silky-skilled, lightning-quick midfielder. Both were members of the Victorian U12 team and were recently returning to the St Peters side from injury. Midfield coach Trent Hotton had watched both players absolutely carve up the much fancied Beaumaris the week before.
A plan had to be hatched.
At training on Friday night, Brendon, Hopey & Trent spent a full hour drilling our midfielders on how to negate the impact of St Peters’ two best players. Without doing a Michael Talia & revealing confidential information, it’d be fair to say we were going to use Luke Nixon-Smith’s bullocking ruckwork & Sam Marshall’s all round bullocking to try & put them off their game.
In the rooms before the game, Brendon’s pre-match address had the boys well pumped. So pumped, there were a couple of dads also who would have happily put the boots on & run through a brick wall. You can usually tell when our boys are “on” before a game & today looked like they’d come to play.
Grey skies & intermittent drizzle meant it was always going to be a slippery, contested match.
Brendon & Hopey told the boys that hard tackling & physical pressure would be the key to victory.
Skipper Zach Bowen led the boys out & we soon found out we’d be kicking against the wind to the northern end. A huge contingent of Rovers parents congregated under some trees behind the coach’s box, and the plethora of puffer jackets looked like a garage sale at Kathmandu.
Opening bounce. Big Luke leapt hard into the St Peters ruckman & Sam came off the line like Mark Yeates in the ’89 GF to collect no.18 with a crunching bump. Unlike Dermott Brereton in ’89, no.18 didn’t break any ribs in the collision, though it would have been handy if he had.
Both teams were throwing themselves at the ball, and you could tell the match was being played at a far higher intensity than usual. The umpire had obviously left his whistle in his dad’s car, because it was apparent free kicks were going to be hard to get. Halfway through the quarter, and neither side had troubled the scorers as yet, when the elusive Jack Kennedy bobbed up for our first goal. St Peters then quickly replied, but Jack finished off the quarter with his second to give us a 6-point lead at the first break.
The second quarter had us kicking with a slight breeze, but the conditions were getting worse.
Our boys were finding it hard to get chains of effective handballs going & were making the mistake of kicking it to the St Peters big men far too often. The match was a tough affair though, and both sides suffered injuries during some bruising tackling. St Peters attacked continually, but our backline of Max Morris, Eli Akinci, Olli Horrigan & Alex Smyth were doing a great job on their opposition forwards. Finally St Peters got a lucky goal when a long kick just cleared the pack & slid through. But Big Zach Ziesing got one back with a huge kick from CHF that bounced through for our third. Ned Gray followed up soon after & we went into the long break with a handy 14-point lead.
½ time: Rovers 4.2.26
St Peters 2..0.12
Brendon got into the boys heads at half time. He pointed out that this third quarter was the one when St Peters would come out firing to try & wrench back the lead. Our intensity, tackling & hardness at the ball couldn’t drop for an instant. And they didn’t let him down. Jamie Delaney was everywhere across the middle, as was the Road Runner twins Dan Hall & Jules Lohan.
Ned had been moved to CHB & he took a couple of very timely intercept marks. Olli Hotton was doing plenty of damage, as were the real twin Hopes & Tuffleys. Kai Forbes was presenting well at full forward, Sam laid some bone-shaking tackles, and Jack Kennedy always looked capable of snagging some more goals. The boys played their hearts out in this quarter, and kept the St Peters boys to a couple of solitary points.
¾ time: Rovers 4.3.27
St Peters 2.2.14
“Fifteen more minutes!” yelled Brendon. “You’ve got fifteen minutes to win a premiership, write yourselves into the history books, become legends, enter the Hall Of Fame, win Masterchef, meet a supermodel & perhaps even be immortalised in bronze outside the Boss James change rooms!” (I may well be paraphrasing here.)
You could kind of tell though that the boys weren’t going to let this one go.
Every player threw themselves at the ball & their opponent. There was not one passenger in this Rovers side.
Oliver Hope got a free on the outer flank & calmly directed his deadly left foot right through the middle.
Then, just to put the icing on the cake, Will Tuffley swooped in and kicked the sealer.
22 points in front with only moments on the clock.
Steve Tuffley had linked his iPhone to the timekeeper’s & excitedly counted down the final ten seconds of the match.
When the siren blew you’d have thought the fathers had just met a supermodel. Elation on the ground from players, coaches & parents. It had been a sensational win, with every single player contributing on the day.
The boys ran a lap of honour before being awarded their premiership medals & singing the song on the dais. “We Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside” rang out even louder once we got back to the rooms.
Without lapsing into cliché & hyperbole, this was indeed a Win For The Ages.
Players and parents kicked on at Boss James where drinks & countless pizzas were consumed.
A brilliant result at the end of a brilliant season.
For the rest of their lives, those kids will be Premiership Players. And that’s something they’ll never forget.
Final scores: Rovers 6.6.42
St Peters 2.2.14
Goals: Kennedy 2, O. Hope, Ziesing, Gray, Tuffley
View & buy photos from the game here >
