Tassie’s giant slayers in touch

TASMANIAN touch football is on a high after its senior mixed team won the Australian championship at Coffs Harbour last weekend and three local players were selected to play for the elite Allies team in the national competition.

State coach Toby Burgess says it is the first time a Tasmanian team has claimed national glory — a tough assignment against the dominant NSW and Queensland teams.

“It’s pretty tough to win a national championship,” Burgess said.

“This is the first time Tasmania has won a national title.

“There is limited success outside NSW and Queensland so in that respect it is a significant achievement for one of the non-rugby league states to win one.”

Burgess was playing coach of the senior mixed team, which was made up of players aged 30-plus in a mixed format that required teams to have three men and three women on the field at all times.

It won four of its six roundrobin games, drew one and lost the other.

In the semi-final, it stomped the Sydney Scorpions 11-1, and beat Brisbane City Cobras 10-6 in the final.

“The end goal was to win it this year and I honestly felt we could do that,” Burgess said.

“I knew we had a good chance with the team that we had.

“We had an experienced team, but it was younger on the masters end of the scale. We had a number of players who had competed before at the tournament so based on our previous experience, we felt we were a pretty good chance of winning.”

Heavy rain washed out one day of play, and wet fields forced other games to be reduced from the normal 40minute game split into two halves, to games of 30 minutes with no break.

“I don’t know if that suited us or not,” Burgess said.

Tasmanians Rebecca Oliver, Emma Haynes and Alice Robinson, who played in the state’s top-level Elite Eight team, were selected to play in the Elite Alliance Squad, made up of players from Victoria, ACT, South Australia, Western Australia and the Northern Territory.

Ashton King was selected to play in a men’s T-League Team with Victoria.