James Armstrong won the Keilor Football Club best-and-fairest award. 35488 Picture: EMILY LANE
By Liam Twomey
NO team likes to blame injuries for poor on-field performance and the Keilor Football Club is no different. The Blues are already looking at how to make sure lightning does not strike twice in the new year.
Club president Kevin O’Reilly said they had learnt a lot from the injury problems and would tailor their pre-season training accordingly.
“We lost some key position players which we didn’t have the depth to cover,” he said. “None of the injuries were soft tissue. They were all bone related, knees, hips, arms and ankles and things like that. All of them were pretty much that bone structural type of damage and there is nothing we can really do about that.”
When the Keilor players return to pre-season training on 14 November they will complete a number of strength programs the club hopes will bring more stability to next season’s line-up. There will also be a number of new faces down at the club with recruiting high on O’Reilly and senior coach Mick McGuane’s off-season priorities.
“We have probably spoken to anything between 30 and 50 players already but the bottom line is that they are just phone calls. That’s just chatter until such time that they sit at the table,” O’Reilly said.
“We have probably had five blokes come to the table to have discussions and we are looking pretty good for at least one or two of them.”
O’Reilly said the number one priority for the Blues was to attract a ruckman followed by a centre-half back.
One player who would welcome some extra assistance down back would be James Armstrong. Due to the injuries to key position defenders, Armstrong was forced to play on some of the Essendon District Football League’s biggest bodies. The task did not seem to worry him after being named the club’s best-and-fairest winner.
“He played on some monsters because we lost our two key backs so he was playing on monsters all year long and he was a well-deserving winner,” O’Reilly said.
The Blues have lost a number of senior players in the off-season who have retired including Travis Moloney and Kieren Prowse.
