ROLL OF DICE ON DEFENDER
WERRIBEE Centrals have received a significant boost ahead of their do-or-die finals clash against Inverleigh tomorrow with Brayden Smith set to return against the Hawks.
The defender has battled a knee injury since July’s win over Thomson. The crucial piece of Werribee’s structure in its back half has trained with the group over the past fortnight, giving coach Nick Smith confidence to roll the dice and select him to play Inverleigh.
“Brayden is probably our most important in terms of how we set up structurally and also just his voice and experience,” Smith said.
“We are rapt to have him back because structurally he is our most important player.
“He’s had a bit of medial strain and hasn’t been able to get through it. Once we got to the point where we knew we had the double chance, we just gave him as much time as we could (to recover).
“But now it’s down to sudden death, we are going to roll the dice with him this week. He has trained fully with us for the past two or three weeks and could have probably played last week (against Bannockburn).”
Centrals are still yet to make a call on Connor Linehan-Cunningham, who injured his knee in last week’s narrow loss to Bannockburn.
Linehan-Cunningham has battled knee troubles this season and Smith labelled him a “50-50 at best” to face the Hawks.
Centrals put in one of their poorest performances of the season in last week’s loss to Bannockburn, going down by just a flattering five points.
Smith was confident his team had learnt a lot from the clash and would be better prepared for tomorrow’s assignment.
“We will definitely be going in with a clear undertaking of how we want to play footy this week, feeling that we didn’t do that last week,” Smith said.
“We had 13 players under 22 (against Bannockburn). I said to them ‘you know what finals feels like, you know what it looks like, you’ve played on that ground’, so this week is now back to playing our footy now that they’ve experienced all of those things.”