MARCUS: Alright Gentlemen it’s our favourite time of the week once again: LTS. Let’s get into our favourite new segment, the best action of the week…Jonty, you can go first.
JONTY: A big mark in the last minute of the game. If you head over to my Hampton Park v Doveton report, you’ll see that. Jack Wilson took a Leo Barry-style mark in the final two minutes of the game. It felt like, and I spoke to Hampton Park people after the game, they were trying to lose the game. If Doveton won it would have been an absolute steal, and he’s come from the side, when it felt like destiny that Doveton was going to get over the top. They had numbers at ground level so Doveton was a good chance to kick a goal – it had to be a contested mark, and Jack Wilson’s gone back and clunked it.
DAVE: The best action I saw was the off-field exploits of the 2013 Narre Warren premiership team. They looked set for a very very big evening. Dan Harders, he came to Narre Warren for one year in 2013 and played in a flag. He’s a big man, a scary presence, and he looked set to run amok all night. I saw Kurt Mutimer snap a beautiful left-foot goal against Monbulk, but I think that’s about it for me.
MARCUS: I was at Gembrook on Saturday. The game was in the balance midway through the last quarter and I think Gembrook Cockatoo were winning by about 17 points. The ball spilled to their captain Josh Tilly who picked the heavy ball up on the run, was running across the face of goal and kicked a check-side goal from about 40 metres out, which was pretty much the dagger. He played a super impressive captain’s game for Gembrook.
MUM’S THE WORD
MARCUS: Somebody misread the calendar last week and thought it was Mother’s Day. It was definitely me. But that gives us the chance to do it this week instead. Let’s take a second to give a shout-out to our mums and talk about how they helped us in our junior exploits. If you guys were anything like me as a kid, you wanted to be captain of the Australian Cricket Team or captain our footy team’s and had dreams and aspirations that our mum’s helped us along the way with. Dave, can you tell us about how your mum helped you in your journey?
DAVE: It sounds like we were very similar mate. When I was younger I’d be dropped off at the golf course straight after school, and mum would have to come and pick me up. Then there was basketball two nights a week, footy training, cricket training. You don’t realise how much you rely on your mum to get you from A to B until you’re a parent yourself. It’s something you love doing for your kids and you’d be letting them down if you didn’t do it. My mum was massive for me. One day she was taking me to the cricket. We used to fill her car with petrol on a Saturday morning and she decided to wash her car this day in one of the drive-through car-washes. Her car fell off the little balancing mechanism and the car had been in there for about 15 minutes and she hadn’t come out. All of a sudden I heard the words “David! David!” in the distance, and I had to go and organise for the lady to turn off the machine so mum could come out of the car-wash. She was covered in soap-suds poor mum, but was clean as a whistle!
JONTY: You mentioned that everyone wanted to be captain of Australia. There’s a photo of me in year five where we all had to write down what we wanted to be when we grow up.
DAVE: When’s that going to take place?
JONTY: Very funny, I’ll move on. I wrote that I wanted to be Australia’s ODI captain at a World Cup. That dream didn’t eventuate, not because of mum, it was because of my lack of talent and work-rate. Similar to all of you, particularly cricket training, I would have had training four or five times a week, whether that be school or club or whatever. There’s also the fact that you want your parents to take you to sporting events when you’re younger. I used to enjoy going to the tennis with mum every year too.
MARCUS: My mum was on the committee of my junior football club, she was the registrar and had to fill-in the excel spread-sheets of everyone’s phone number, where they lived, and had to deal with parents whinging about why their son wasn’t in a certain team. She then helped my Dad when he was the team manager in later years. I also want to give a shout-out to Sharon and Jessie-Lee Fitzpatrick from the Hallam Football Club, a mother-daughter combination who played their 50th game together on Saturday.
DAVE: I also want to highlight the dedication of some of the girls in the Pakenham Women’s Football team. They’ll organise babysitters for their Tuesday and Thursday night training and it’s quite common for the coach to be talking to the girls at the end of a training session and see babysitters walking out with babies in hand. There’s so much dedication that doesn’t go unnoticed.
RULE CHANGES?
MARCUS: I’m not sure if any of you caught the end of the Super Netball game between the Melbourne Vixens and West Coast Fever on Sunday, but Kiera Austin from the Vixens nailed a two-point super-shot to win their game at the buzzer. It was a pretty exciting way to finish the game and it got me thinking about whether or not we could incorporate this at local netball. I think it would always add a bit of excitement, but let’s go through some pros and cons.
DAVE: I think reasons for it, logistically it wouldn’t be too hard to do. It’s really just paining another line on the netball court. I think it would be easy to accommodate and I don’t think it would put too much extra pressure on the umpires. The downside would be that there would be a premium on ‘Goaler’s. You could have an evenly matched team but if you had a really good ‘Goaler’ you could still beat the opposition by a lot just through a handful of shots. It might put a premium too much on that particular player instead of being a really even team sport.
JONTY: From a negative, at local level, a lot more than the elite level, the difference between the best player and the worst player is a lot more because the depth is tested. You wouldn’t want games continually decided by that, when it’s not been how netball’s traditionally been played. Having said that, I think the need for sport to innovate is certainly a pro. You look at cricket with T20 and other sports are trying it, like hockey with trying Hockey 5s. I think sports trying to implement that sort of thing has to be looked at.
DAVE: Does netball need a gimmick like that at local level?
JONTY: If it’s at the elite level you’d want it to bleed down into the local level, so the next generation are accustomed to it.
MARCUS: That was one of my points. If local competitions had the two-point super shot, locals would be better prepared and adjusted if they were to make the jump to professional level, and might make themselves more of a target for recruiters. Also, if there’s a blowout it can work against one team, in that they could have one team really blow-up the margin, but if you were down a significant deficit you could try and erase the deficit quickly. It’s certainly something that would be interesting if they did include it. Maybe we’ll put that to league administrators and see what they have to say.
AFL AWARDS BALLOT
MARCUS: So we’re now one-third of the way into the AFL season and I want to do a snap awards ballot. I want your picks for premier, runner up, Brownlow medallist and wooden spoon.
JONTY: Premier, I want to say Collingwood but I don’t want to jinx it, so I’m going to say Brisbane to beat Collingwood in the grand final. I think Marcus Bontempelli will win the Brownlow but I think Jordan Dawson will be winning it at this point in the year. Maybe that’s me trying to get on the good side of Adelaide supporters after I picked them to finish second-last. I’ll pick West Coast for the wooden spoon because they’ve been so decimated by injury.
MARCUS: Why Brisbane?
JONTY: Their midfield. I think they’ve got enough tall forwards who can click at the right time and I think they’ve got all the right ingredients, the spine, the midfield, depth, excitement.
DAVE: I’m a Collingwood supporter as well and they just keep winning, which is a great thing. I think Melbourne would be my favourites right now because the Max Gawn and Brodie Grundy combination is starting to work. I think that’s going to be a really lethal combination come September. So I’ll say Melbourne and Collingwood to reunite their rivalries from the 1950s and 1960s. With my Brownlow prediction, I think Nick Daicos has had a flying start, but I don’t think he can sustain that level yet for a full season. But players like Bontempelli, Patrick Cripps, Christian Petracca have proven they can do it for 22 rounds. So the ‘Bont’ is my tip for the Brownlow and I’ve also got Dawson as a smokey. Wooden spoon, West Coast. They deserve it, they’re hopeless.
MARCUS: I think Melbourne has really flown under the radar this season and just keep winning. They’ve still got an incredibly strong midfield and I don’t know if it’s just because I’m covering their VFL side, but they’ve got some serious players not in their best 22. Charlie Spargo and Ben Brown, who played in their 2021 flag, were in the reserves on the weekend, then there’s Jake Melksham, Tom McDonald, Adam Tomlinson, senior players who could all come in and play a role. Their depth’s a huge asset.
JONTY: If Gold Coast won on Saturday night, would you both be raving about Melbourne as much? Are you really sold on their process or have you just been sold on their wins?
MARCUS: It’s a fair point but they do have the credits in the bank. I think they’ve got a lot of really good role players, too.
DAVE: What about Geelong?
MARCUS: They’re my runners up. I think they’re going to peak at the right time. Sticking on Geelong, I’m going to go a bit left-field and pick Jeremy Cameron to win the Brownlow. I don’t think there’s been a more impactful permanent forward that I’ve seen since Buddy Franklin when he was at his best. We know the Brownlow isn’t for key forwards, but if there was going to be a forward to win it, it’s him.
DAVE: Matthew Richardson was a key forward who went and played on the wing in his last year and nearly won it. Maybe Cameron is a similar player because he gets up the field and gets noticed.
MARCUS: My wooden spooner, I’m going to North Melbourne. They’re a dismal outfit and it’s very much a honeymoon season for Alistair Clarkson. There’s no expectations on them and it would be silly of them not to blood as many young players as they could.
MARCUS: Another stunning episode, let’s go smash out our stories for this week.
DAVE: One quick shout out…love ya, Mum!
