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Our NEAFL season spiked again on Saturday night with a resounding victory over a strong Brisbane Lions squad.
With seven young top-up players in our team, this shaped as one of our biggest challenges of the year.
The theme for this week was simply ‘EFFORT’ on the back of a poor effort against NT Thunder last week and with the senior team focused on competing with the EFFORT required to match the best team in the land, Collingwood.
After the Lions kicked the opening two goals we kicked the next four and began to take the ascendancy.
Brisbane worked their way back early in the second quarter to level the scores but from this point on until 21 minutes into the last term our boys were able to pile on 13 goals to one in a dominant performance.
Tom Hickey once again lead the way with some excellent ruckwork and marking around the ground. He finished with three terrific goals and is growing in confidence quickly.
Jeremy Taylor, our pick 39 in last year’s national draft, maybe our next debutant after he continued to prove his ability to play strongly off half-back.
Following a long-term pre-season injury, which kept him out of footy for half the season, he has worked professionally to position himself to play AFL footy.
Hailing from Geelong, Jeremy is the best endurance athlete in our squad and has a great balance of 1v1 defence and dashing offence. He reminds me a lot of star Geelong player Corey Enright.
Jacob Gillbee had one of his best games through the midfield and up forward. His crumbing work was fantastic and enabled him to kick a personal best four goals.
We have loved his workrate all season and have been promising that the rewards would come if he continually worked to play his role. This came to fruition on the weekend. Sadly, he has injured his hand and might be missing for several weeks.
Others to shine were Karmichael, Luke Russell and Joey Daye. Joey is a player with amazing athletic ability who needs to use his assets consistently like he did on the weekend.
Whenever he takes himself to the game instead of waiting for it to come to him and competes aggressively, he shows he could make an impact at AFL level.
Finally, credit must be given to all of our top-up players for their efforts against the Lions.
They contributed 8 of the 18 goals we kicked. Josh Hall, an Olympic-level high jumper (best jump 2.26m) was one of these and in only his 5th game of AFL against a number of AFL players kicked two goals and looked exciting.
This week we take a break with the senior team tackling St. Kilda.
Following the bye we will take on Broadbeach, the club I coached before joining the Gold Coast SUNS.
See you at Metricon on Saturday and then at Broadbeach on the 6th of August at 2pm.
Go Suns!
Shaun Hart
