By Michael Esposito
WERRIBEE’S 38-point loss to Casey on Saturday summed up its season to a tee.
In Simon Atkins’s final game as coach and Teghan Henderson’s farewell game, Werribee ended season 2010 with a performance that was nearly there, but not quite.
That’s been the story for the Tigers all year: just four wins and second-last on the ladder.
Werribee started strongly against third-placed Casey, finishing the entertaining, high-scoring first quarter four points up, before going missing in the second quarter and allowing the Scorpions to kick five unanswered goals.
Alan Obst and captain Dominic Gleeson kicked two early goals for the Tigers in the third quarter, but Casey’s Matthew Bate booted two goals in a minute to effectively put the game beyond doubt.
The Tigers’ second-quarter performance was all too familiar. Gleeson expressed his disappointment with his side’s inability to string four good quarters together this season.
“I think this year we were maybe a little bit mentally soft,” Gleeson said. “We seemed to be in the hunt for three-and-a-half quarters, there’s just a 20-minute period that has let us down every week. And that just loses games. You can’t afford to do that.
“We can’t use being a young side as an excuse because every other VFL team is young.”
Gleeson said the Tigers aimed to make the top four at the beginning of the season, but injuries to key players made such ambitions unattainable.
“With the injuries that we incurred and the recruits that we got in who were injury-plagued throughout the whole year, that aim just didn’t seem feasible.
“We believe we got the three best ex-AFL players that were available – Cam Wight, Matt Laidlaw and Mitch Thorp. All three of those guys have tackled adversity though injury.
“Looking back at it, it’s going to haunt us as a year gone begging because I believe we definitely did have the talent. Obviously we lost (James) Podsiadly a couple of years ago and Micky Barlow last year, but apart from that we’ve retained most of our players.”
Gleeson said the loss of Scott Howard at the start of the year because of work commitments, left a significant hole in Werribee’s backline.
“He was probably our best player at the start of the season, so to lose him was again another dagger to the heart and one that will haunt us,” he said.
In spite of all that was frustrating and regrettable about the season, some positives could be extracted.
At least Werribee improved in the second half of the season. The Tigers still only won three of their last nine games, but they rarely got blown away like they did in the early part of the season.
Another positive was the emergence of exciting young players, which Werribee has a habit of producing on a regular basis.
“Not a lot has been said about North Melbourne young guys in Matthew Scott, who I think will go on and make it, Nathan O’Keefe who, with another pre-season, will get stronger and fitter, and Alan Obst who has shown what a class act he is in the recent couple of weeks,” Gleeson said.
The captain also praised the performances of talented VFL-listed youngsters Kyle Hartigan, 19, and Scott Sherlock, 20.
“Scott Sherlock has been an out-and-out champion this year and I think he’ll win our best first year player award,” Gleeson said.
But it has been the same stand-outs from last season who again stood out for the Tigers, with not enough support from the second and third-tier players
“Michael Rockefeller, Rob Castello, Will Martinello, Brant Dickson and to an extent myself have been fairly consistent over the year and something we can hold our head high about, but there’ve been times where we all fell away,” Gleeson said.
“One thing that Simon (Atkins) did mention throughout the course of the year is that there was no one really aspiring to take over the reins.
“We wanted to mould the younger guys beneath us to take the reins and I think as a leadership group we probably failed to do that.”
Flinn Chisolm, Sam Wormald and reserves players Ben Fletcher and Travis Lunardi have been identified as future leaders of the club.
Speaking on departing coach Simon Atkins’s influence on Werribee, Gleeson said: “Hopefully the next coach who does come in does take the reins straight away and fills the void of Simon but I really don’t think we’ll fully understand until we line up for round one next year the impact that he has had on our group.
“He’s made us into better footballers and better people all round in terms of being leaders at the club and leading by example.”
