Real possibility

“We’ve done extra Wednesday training sessions leading up to the finals to get ourselves cherry ripe,” he said.

“It goes a long way towards winning games of footy at the end of the year.

“I think our firepower up forward is really pivotal and we train specifically for goal-kicking – that’s a fairly big element to winning games of footy.

“We’ve been rewarded for it, because our accuracy has been not too bad this year.”

Pekin said an intense desire to win consecutive flags for the first time in the district league was the driving force behind everything. “Back to back premierships is a really big goal,” he said. “Douglas-harrow-miga Lake won a flag 40 years ago and then there was the 1999 flag, so there is a little bit of extra incentive to keep those reunions going.

“You get to celebrate a beer with the club 10 years down the track with those reunions, so it’s something that is a bit special.

“One of my goals this year is for us to win premierships in the seniors, reserves and under-17s.”

Pekin said the team had adopted a finals mindset before its round 15 clash with second-placed Edenhope-apsley a month ago and was determined to keep bettering itself.

“We identified Edenhope-apsley as being one of the biggest games for the year, so we’ve had that pencilled in for a while and our finals campaign started then,” he said.

“We look to keep improving on the small things, the one percenters, going forward.

“Our mindset has always been that we want to achieve the ultimate success at the end of the year.

“The mentality within the group has been really good and if we can just keep fine tuning those little things, I’m sure we can do it.”