Down, but not out in Round 6

Our Round 6 clash back at Stratarama Stadium against West Adelaide certainly didn’t start as we would have liked, with the unfortunate injuries to Will Stockman and James Bell in the first 6 minutes of the game. Not ideal to be down 2 players that early in the game against an up and coming team that are prepared to compete long into games. What is pleasing, is that through a little bit adversity and then being challenged strongly in the second half, we were able to grind out an important and strong win. At this point of the season finding ways to win and responding well when things are not going as we are wanting is and will be important as we get deeper into the season.

There was a lot going on throughout the first quarter both on the field and on the sideline with several structural changes needed to work our way through the situation. As the game played out over the day, scoring to the Southern end was difficult with a reasonable breeze. With all that going on our first quarter effort was pleasing for the fact we had stopped West Adelaide from gaining any advantage on the score board and able to put a couple of goals on the board ourselves. The second quarter we were happy with how the game looked, we were able to dominate the territory and with some strong ball movement throughout the early part put a nice gap in the game. With plenty of numbers around the ball and in our forward half we were not able to impact as much as we would have liked and left the game still up for grabs. The third quarter played out like that with West able to put us under pressure on the score board from some sloppy skill errors and some not great decisions around stoppage on our behalf. While that part created some frustration, pleasingly we were able to shut the game down reasonably well through the second half of the quarter and hit the score board ourselves late which was important in the context of the game.

To West Adelaide’s credit, they came again in the last quarter and while again we didn’t help ourselves in a few instances, we were able to stay connected when it mattered to get the momentum and territory back in our advantage and get the score board looking more comfortable. There has been a strong focus over the last few weeks with how we are defending the ground as a team, as it hadn’t been how we wanted it over the first part of the season. Over the last 2 weeks we have been able to see some strong improvement here. That is a big positive that we take away as we keep building and we know it will help the rest of our game get back to the consistent level we pride ourselves on.

Well done to our Reserves group who were able to put a strong 4 quarter performance together. Like our League group, there were some strong signs defensively and from that they were able to put together some strong offensive passages. There were several strong individual efforts amongst the group, but most pleasing was the consistency of the effort across the 22 over the day. When they can stay engaged in this area, they will be able to challenge most teams in the competition and we will see guys pushing hard for opportunities above.

We head into a bye weekend with a State game in Perth. Good luck to the players that are part of this squad in Matthew Allen, Corey Lyons, Luke Reynolds, Chris Curran and Riley Holder. Following that we will head over to Woodville for our round 7 clash with The Eagles. This will be a great challenge for us, and we look forward to getting stuck into that opportunity. We will be boosted by the return of some of our injured players that will be jumping out of their skin to get back playing. We look forward to seeing a large contingent of Glenelg supporters there to cheers us on.

Go The Bays

– Darren Reeves, Senior Coach

Goal kickers: Reynolds (3), Allen (2), McBean (2), Stagg, Stretch, Window

Best Players: Lyons, Proud, Allen, Reynolds, Scharenberg, Holder