Spotswood coach Chris O’Keefe and captain Ray Jensen with the premiership cup. 70575 Picture: KRISTIAN SCOTT
BY MICHAEL ESPOSITO
SPOTSWOOD played second fiddle to Albion all season, but on the day it mattered most, the Woodsmen conquered.
Albion took “benchmark” status off Spotswood for 12 months, but the Green and Gold have reclaimed it, after winning their fourth grand final in five years.
Ironically, Spotswood coach Chris O’Keefe said his side’s semi-final loss to Albion was advantageous to its premiership quest.
Albion on the other hand may have suffered from having two weeks off in a four-week finals series.
“In my three premierships at Spotswood we’ve played every week in the finals and you’re just match hardened and it worked for us today,” he said.
Certainly Spotswood’s punishing encounter against Altona the week before did not seem to have had a burdensome effect.
“We knew we had plenty left in the tank at three-quarter time and a few of their guys were battling, and we just kept plowing away and we’ve got plenty of good runners, so it worked really, really well,” O’Keefe said.
“I’m just so proud of the boys because I just empowered them all day to take the game on, to run and play on and take it on and not go into our shells and they did that. And the more we did that the more we were getting on top and running away with it.
“I’m actually very relieved. I’ve said many times that Albion are a very, very, very good team, and if we weren’t at our best we wouldn’t win, so we put a lot of work into devising a plan to try and nullify their strengths and to allow ourselves to play our game and win. I was a bit worried there during that first quarter but after that we really started to click.”
It sounds cliched, but Spotswood had 22 blokes who were committed to the cause. Blokes who O’Keefe described as misfits.
“From the start of the year we lost a heap of our key players and a lot of people wrote us off at the beginning. I didn’t say anything, I just took it all in my stride,” O’Keefe said.
“We’re not very big but as a group, we’re fantastic. What one person lacks, the other person excels at, so from a group point of view I couldn’t be happier with the boys.”
Albion coach Marcus Barclay said the loss was hard to take, given his side went in as favourites.
“As a club it was such a successful season last year when no-one expected the club to win. And this year probably a lot of the supporters expected us to win, so I think that’s a bitter pill to swallow,” he said. “When you probably go in as favorite and don’t win it’s something you’ve got to think about for at least six months.”
Barclay said he was surprised by the Cats’ lack of run in the second quarter.
“We seemed to paddle a little bit in the second quarter. I don’t know if that was because of the week off, and that hard game last week from Spotswood probably they just continued that momentum.
“In that last quarter you can’t take too much away form Spotswood. When you’ve got your tails up you seem to have loose blokes everywhere. I think halfway through the second quarter we just dropped away.”
Barclay said he will spend considerable time dwelling on the shortcomings of Albion’s performance, but can also take several positives out of the year, which only yielded two losses – both to Spotswood and at the furthermost points in the season.
“When you get to the end of the game you’ve got to think about the season.”
