By JARROD POTTER
DANDENONG versus… Dandenong?
The first match in an important pre-season was held Sunday morning as the Dandenong Stingrays took to Frankston Park for an intra-club match.
The TAC Cup team – on the hunt for a maiden TAC Cup premiership after falling over at the preliminary final stage in 2014 – is on the lookout for the next generation of Stingrays’ talent and fielded the intra-club match with first year and newly arrived players to test their mettle in a match situation.
The elder heads got to take the morning off… at least in the match itself. The likes of returning 19-year-olds and top agers – Daniel Capiron, Gach Nyuon, Jordan Freeman, Reece Piper, Thomas Jok and Tom Glen amongst others – were left to slug it out for a hard training session then down to the beach to cool off.
The real intra-club battle wasn’t for scoreboard supremacy, but to make an impact and leave a lasting impression on the coaches as cuts start soon to whittle down the final squad.
“It’s pretty tough, the first intra-club, but we thought it was a pretty good standard,” Dandenong coach Craig Black said.
“We were pretty happy with that and obviously with a lot of the senior players rested, all the kids we haven’t seen in game situations yet, gave them a bit more of an opportunity.”
In a literal sense, 205cm basketball convert Jayden Bubb, 18, from Berwick, stood head and shoulders above his direct opponents. He proved a handful up forward and in the ruck as he slotted goals and led brilliantly from the square.
Devoted to football over basketball for the first time in a few years – after earning a ticket to the prestigious Basketball Without Borders Asia Camp last year – Bubb made the right impression on Black, who believes the towering talent’s enormous tank and good ground level skills should see him do well in his inaugural TAC Cup season.
“The idea was just to play him for a half – play him forward just because he hasn’t played footy for a long time,” Black said.
“Give him that game-sense and we said ‘mate don’t lead’ and the first three times he led and marked the footy.
“Kicked a couple of goals and went to the ruck for five minutes here and tap work, it’s definitely very exciting to coach someone like that.”
Also standing out in the crowd was Cory Machaya – the Narre Warren livewire with a bag of tricks up forward.
“First time I’ve seen him play in a game situation but he was very exciting, especially in the first half when we played him close to goal… and he took the game on and was very unselfish in the forward line, so that was a really good sign,” Black said.
Dandenong’s next step in its pre-season checklist is a practice match against Sandringham Dragons at Trevor Barker Beach Reserve on Sunday.
