Echuca under-18 coach Damian Slater with his team after Saturday morning's training run. Flanking him were the team's birthday boys - on the left is Arch Weeks and on the right is Albert Cunningham, who are hoping to get a premiership flag this Sunday as a belated birthday present.
Photo by
Andrew Mole
Everybody’s talking about Echuca football’s perfect season in Goulburn Valley League.
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Everybody except the players that is.
The club has bigger fish to fry – it’s looking for three flags.
That’s the business end of the season – that would be the really perfect result.
So if the reserves and under-18s complete the miracle year and go through undefeated, well that would just be the icing on the cake.
Bright and early Saturday morning under-18 coach Damian Slater had his charges ripping through an intense 60-minute tune up before giving them the weekend off.
And he’s not talking perfect either, he’s talking premiership.
It’s his second season at the helm and the team bowed out in the preliminary final in season one, so he wants this as much as his players.
“To be completely honest, none of us have really been talking about it, or even thinking about it,” Slater said.
“Even this morning the focus was simply on finetuning our gameplan because, let’s face it, if we don’t win this Sunday none of the rest means all that much,” he said.
“Finals footy is different, grand finals are another thing altogether, so you need to win just one game and it’s a pretty perfect year.”
Slater sees the big picture – the Shepparton Bears are a good side and with his boys the only ones to have defeated them this year, twice no less, he said that has only made Shepp hungrier and put targets on the back of his players.
Echuca under-18 coach Damian Slater marshalling his troops during Saturday morning's high intensity training session.
Photo by
Andrew Mole
Plus, Shepp has been significantly bolstered by the return of its small army of stars with the Murray Bushrangers.
“We have our own Pioneers back in the side, and that is a big bonus for us, but make no mistake, this is going to be a very tough game,” Slater said.
“We have been building for this, we have a great mix of top and bottom age players, and the boys are taking it very seriously – they have trained hard, they really work as a team, and they’re good kids.”
Under 18 co-captain Jett Kervin and Kristian Fitzsimmons, a member of the leadership, are just as focused as their mentor.
Kervin, a Year 12 St Joseph’s College student, who plays in the midfield, definitely knows he and his mates are one game from all sorts of achievements, and he doesn’t mind saying he wants the lot.
But is also realistic enough to know you have to win flags; no-one hands them to you.
“First thing, we want to win, and we’re hopeful all the work we have done will get us there – we are at full strength, so we’re as good as we’re going to get,” Kervin said.
“But Shepp is a very good side and the previous two wins against them don’t count here – but we have been getting better every week, the team really gets along well together and now we just have to do what the coach says – most of the time,” he grinned.
Fitzsimmons, the centre half-back/on-baller, is one of Echuca’s 15 Melbourne-based players – he’s in Year 12 at Caulfield Grammar – and made the trip up for the weekend session.
“The guys in Melbourne are from across all our teams, and we train together at North Melbourne, which has worked pretty well for us all year,” he said.
“And when we get home, we’re back with mates, we have all played together since we started.
“This will be a tough ask, but I think, we all think, we can get the job done.”
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