Tim Jenkins was St Albans’ best player in its loss to Spotswood on the weekend. 85095 Picture: DAMIAN VISENTINI
By ADEM SARICAOGLU
A HEAVILY-DEPLETED St Albans side struggled to be competitive with WRFL pacesetters Spotswood on Saturday after they went down by 124 points at Kings Park Reserve.
The Woodsmen destroyed the Saints with an 11-goal third quarter on their way to kicking 23 for the game while managing to concede just three.
St Albans could only manage four behinds in the opening term but poor kicking from both sides meant Spotswood’s quarter time lead was just 21 points, which by half-time was doubled to 42.
Having goaled in the second term, St Albans then went goalless once more in third term as Spotswood took them to the sword and by three-quarter time found themselves down my more than 100 points.
A respectable final term by the Saints ensured the final margin didn’t balloon out much further.
St Albans coach Ian Denny said his young side was simply outmuscled by Spotswood’s bigger bodies.
“We had probably four under-18s playing and another few blokes that have only played about five games of senior footy,” Denny said.
“It’s a bit hard to go into a game against one of the quality teams with that sort of list and expect to have a big result.”
The Saints’ final score of 3.12 (30) could have been a lot more respectable had they have kicked straight throughout the game.
“We probably should have nearly been level at quarter time. We had opportunities to put some scoreboard pressure on them and we failed to take that,” Denny said.
“When you haven’t got scoreboard pressure you’ll feel more pressure around the ground and that’s what happened, they just blew us away in the third quarter.”
Spotswood coach Chris O’Keefe, who was reappointed as the club’s coach for 2013 during the week, said he couldn’t ask for much more from his side’s performance on the weekend.
“We knew that St Albans had been in some pretty good form, they really pushed Hoppers Crossing the week before,” O’Keefe said.
“We really set ourselves to make sure we played four quarters of footy that was going to be really solid all day and make sure we put them under a lot of pressure and we were able to do that, which was great.”
With finals now just three weeks away, O’Keefe said there is still areas of Spotswood’s game that need to be worked on over the next fortnight.
“We need to continue working on our structures and our forwards entries, which at times weren’t that great (on Saturday) but we can certainly improve on,” he said.
“Our pressure was pretty good at times, but I reckon we can still improve on that a little bit more as well.”
This week St Albans travels to North Footscray while Spotswood goes to Hoppers Crossing.
