Keeping the faith
ST JOSEPH’S coach Riley Richardson believes his side’s best is good enough to be competitive in finals after Joeys nailed Colac by a goal in a thriller on Saturday.
The home side led by five goals at the final change on the back of a brilliant third term, before holding on for the narrowest of wins, 39-38.
The vital win kept Joeys in striking distance of the top five, half a game behind fifth-placed Bell Park, at the halfway point of the season.
“We have a couple of big games — we have South Barwon and Newtown again — in the second half of the season, but we’ve also got a couple of games we dropped that we’d be looking to improve our result on, with Bell Park and St Mary’s, playing those two again,” Richardson said.
“Hopefully when it comes to crunch time that draw sets us up nicely and that two points might make all the difference by Round 18, who knows?”
The side’s defence has been clinical this year, restricting teams to an average of 42 points a game, ranking them third best in the competition.
But the Joeys attack is still a work in progress — 40 points a game for ranking them third worst in the league.
“When it’s not been on, it’s not been on with us; there’s been an issue with our scoring, we’ve had some really low volume games,” Richardson said. “That being said, it’s something we’re working on and we’ve also got two quite young shooters — Kailah-Mae Keepen I think is 19 and Georgia Clark is only 18 — they’re both stepping up in their roles on court.
“Every week I continue to be more impressed with what they put out there and really happy with the way things are building coming into the second half of the season.
“We’re blessed with Tori Honner, league best and fairest at goal defence, and we managed to pick up Dani Wilson in the off-season at goal keeper, so our back two has been a bit of a fortress for us and they certainly saved our bacon on more than one occasion yesterday.”
Richardson credited his side for finding a way to produce its best in the third quarter to establish a matchwinning lead.
“One thing we’ve been working on at training is trying to maintain 60 minutes of focus and at half-time the girls recognised they weren’t maintaining a consistent approach for the 15 minutes,” he said. “They really took it upon themselves to improve that in the third and it really showed. We just kept it ahead but they really started to peg it back in the last two or three minutes, we missed a few sitters under the post and they capitalised. We just did enough in the third to keep ourselves comfortable.” — G. Clark 23, L. Bell 10, K. Keepen 6. R. Scott 29, E. Murfitt 7, M. Allan 2. E.J. Post, D. Wilson, M. Jovic. K. Lang, R. Scott, C. Hillman