SAINTS GIVE LIONS THE BOOT
SUBLIME ST MARY’S A GENUINE THREAT
ST MARY’S showed it is a live premiership threat with a 90point elimination final win over Leopold yesterday.
The red-hot Saints completely obliterated Leopold in the second half, playing slick football in an eight-goal-tonone third quarter and, in turn, bundling the Lions out of the finals in the 21.11 (137) to 7.5 (47) rout.
Having turned their season around since being 1-4, and having also defeated St Joseph’s, Colac and Newtown & Chilwell, belief is building, according to co-coach Glenn Keast.
“We know the way we want to play, and if we can execute that we should be confident we can beat any opposition,” Keast said.
“We’re pretty confident our best is very good, but we just need to narrow our focus over the next couple of weeks.
“We kept them to 1.2 in the second half, so our ability to not just score and have good ball movement, but our protection behind it and defend was really good as well.”
St Mary’s jumped out of the blocks, with Kyle Reid (three goals) booting the opening goal of the game inside the first minute, and the Saints kicked the first three goals unanswered before Joel Moloney’s goal finally got Leopold going.
St Mary’s then belted Leopold in the second half, using fast-ball movement from its back half to slice Leopold open.
Doug Bond (three goals for the game), Reid and Tom Lang (four goals) were all prominent in the impressive showing as they held Leopold to a single goal in the second half.
“Our ball movement after half-time was really good,” Keast said. “We had a really good start to the game and we were really focused on not letting Leopold get into the game.
“To their credit, they were back in it midway through the first quarter, but I thought our guys were terrific”
Trent McMullan kept Leopold spearhead Lucas Boyd goalless, while Brady Pritchard kicked three goals opposed to Lions star Tom Ruggles for a large part of the day.