This was the best win I can remember for many years. I think we’re a real football team again and I don’t think we’ll fall apart in the second half of the season.
At the beginning it didn’t look good. I got to my seat only a couple of minutes before the game started, but I had caught snatches of the warm up on TVs that I passed on the way to aisle 13, and to me GWS looked sharp and we looked lackadaisical and slow. And that’s the way the teams played in the first quarter. Posters have mentioned our elite high pressure in the last quarter; in the first quarter it was pitifully low. We fully deserved to be three goals down at quarter time.
The sole highlight of the first quarter was Alwyn Davey’s goal. In a one on one contest he beat his opponent and executed the kick beautifully. I thought the team could have got around him a bit more when it went through.
The second quarter started where the first had left off. Our pressure was still woeful and our skills too. Again Davey came to the rescue, getting a kick away to Langford that gave him a set shot at goal. It was a high degree of difficulty, a fair way out and literally on the boundary line, but Langers stepped right up and put it cleanly through the middle.
By this time our pressure level had risen just a little bit, from utterly abysmal to mediocre, but I thought the turning point of the game was Archie Perkins’ long running goal shortly after the Davey/Langford goal. It was as if the players realised that despite GWS’ dominance to that point, we weren’t that far behind.
It was a bit of an arm wrestle, and not a very high standard, for the remainder of the second and beginning of the third, but you could see that our pressure was continuing to rise and we were clearly getting on top in general play. Several very sub-standard shots at goal didn’t help the cause, but Redman’s long one definitely lifted the team. The second quarter had been 3 goals to 2 in our favour, and the third was 5 to 2. We were clearly outplaying GWS, our pressure level kept getting higher and higher, the crowd was going through the roof, and we had taken the lead and didn’t look as if we were going to give it up.
And we didn’t. We scored another goal at the beginning of the last; GWS pulled it back; but we responded with two more to pull out to a 3-goal plus lead. Posters have written about us closing down the game from that point, but that’s not how I saw it. What I saw was two teams playing at the highest level of pressure, both attacking at every opportunity, but neither of them scoring because neither was allowed to. It was nail-biting stuff until, with about 3 minutes to go, both teams seemed to realise that we were going to win, and we were able to chip the ball around in the backline until the final siren went.
A truly great win.
There were too many good players to mention them all, but I’ll mention a couple who seem to have been overlooked a little. Perkins, for a start: not only did he kick that team-lifting goal, but he gave passes into the forward line like bullets that set up two or 3 more. McGrath in the backline all day: he wins the ball; he gets clear; he hits targets – and he’s the general down there. And Redman: he’s been showing signs for a few weeks, but I’m hoping that that long goal will restore his confidence and we’ll see him at his best from now on.
The best thing is that I don’t think this team is afraid of anyone. We have Sydney and Geelong above us and we have yet to play FC and Melbourne, but I think the players will be looking forward to playing those teams and thinking that if they play at their best, they can knock them off.
