Warriors go back to the drawing board

WARRIORS coach Glen Davey concedes his team has been left to “lick their wounds” ahead of the North Queensland Football premier league finals after a controversial 1-1 draw with MA Olympic.

Saturday’s top-of-the-table clash lived up to expectations to finish the regular season, but Warriors came off worse for wear after Masi Benjamin and Jahya Hilton-mckeown were both red carded.

It means the state league duo will miss the next two games including the semi-final showdown between Warriors and Olympic, with the winner to go straight through to the grand final.

“It wasn’t such a fiery game. It was two pretty strange incidents to be honest,” Davey said.

“The first one, our guy Masi tried to control the ball and bring it down. He has collected him (the Olympic player), but it certainly wasn’t above the knee and get your studs up or anything.

“It’s not good, but I suppose the thing was we played over an hour with 10 men and then about 20 minutes with nine men and they struggled to draw with us.

“We were pretty happy with the character that we showed – that’s for sure.”

Olympic have been the clear benchmark this season as they wrapped up the premiership with four rounds left to play, but their three meetings with Warriors have all been close contests.

The competition now has a two-week break before the finals and Davey said Warriors would use that time to come up with a strategy to beat Olympic without two of their star players.

“We know we can certainly match them, but kudos to them, they’ve won it (the premiership) pretty easily this year,” he said.

“I’ve seen them play a fair bit during the year so we know how they set up and what their strongest line-up is and they probably know our strongest line-up too.”

Meanwhile, Wulguru has clinched the last top-four spot after claiming a 2-0 win over Burdekin to hold off a fierce finals charge from Saints Eagles

Souths. Saints Eagles Souths took the battle for fourth place down to the wire after fighting back from 2-0 down at halftime against Rebels on Saturday to secure a 3-2 victory.

But it wasn’t enough to knock Wulguru out of finals contention as their win over Burdekin on Sunday saw the Roosters finish three competition points clear on the ladder.

Wulguru will now take on Brothers in the elimination semi-final after Brothers suffered a surprise 3-2 loss to lastplaced Ingham.