September on the Border means two things:
the world-famous Henty Field Days and an Albury-Yarrawonga grand final. For the
fifth consecutive year, the Tigers and the Pigeons met at the Lavington
Panthers Oval on the penultimate Sunday in September for de facto supremacy in country Victorian football.
After the eighteen-game regular season
(punctuated by the league’s representative selection losing to the Mornington
Peninsula League at Cardboard Oval Princes Park), Albury emerged as
minor premiers; the Big Two had traded home wins in their two encounters, but
Yarrawonga had dropped a further four points at Lavington in Round 15. The
finals series, conducted according to the bog-standard McIntyre Final Five
format and played entirely at neutral venues, then ensued, with Lavington,
Wangaratta Rovers, and North Albury (captain-coached by some guy who was in the
AFL once) falling by the wayside. The region’s two strongest clubs were left
standing to fight it out on the second-last Sunday in September.
The Lavington Sports Club Oval
Panthers Oval sits on land on the urban fringe that was once part of Hume
Shire, a product of the era when virgin outer suburban land was the fashionable
place to build stadiums, leading football administrators to concoct brilliant
schemes likes Waverley Park. Under its former name, it hosted two NSWRL
pre-season competition finals, one NSW-Victoria Sheffield Shield match, and one match
at the 1992 cricket World Cup, in which Zimbabwe, newly ennobled to test
status, dismissed Graham Gooch for a duck and held Ian Botham to eighteen to
upset England by nine runs. It was to this Hallowed Turf that your humble
correspondent would journey to witness the annual titanic struggle between two
of the finest eighteens ever assembled in country football.
Earlier in the season, your humble correspondent observed
Albury’s thumping victory against cross-town rivals
North Albury in the Anzac Day blockbuster, noting that the Tigers’ strength
derived from the combination of a strong defence, Chris Hyde’s dominance of the
forward line, and the willingness of 2012 Morris Medallist Joel Mackie to Get
Stuck In™. The form shown on that day, when the homeboys outclassed the
mid-table mediocrity of Akermanis and Friends, evidently continued throughout
the season, and the eighteen-time premiers racked up seventeen wins, the minor
premiership, and a free pass to the second week of Professor McIntyre’s famous
finals format.
In addition to their star recruit being
relieved of Dancing With The Stars
duties this season, Yarrawonga added to its ranks another ex-AFL player: Brad
Ottens, late of the Cattery. The Pigeons were undefeated for most of the year,
until they lost two of their last four on away trips to the Queen City of the
South. They redeemed themselves by opening up an almighty can of Whoop-Ass on
Lavington in the qualifying final at West Wodonga, winning by sixty-four points.
Then came the second semi-final at North Albury, and an unexpected
thirty-two-point Pigeons victory, spurred by an eight-goal haul by That Man Fev.
Banished to the preliminary final, the Tigers travelled to Wangaratta for a
derby against Lavington. In a pulsating encounter in which both sides gave 110%,
went in hard, put their bodies on the line, and various other clichés of sports
journalism, the Tigers came from twenty points behind in the final term to
prevail by one point, and booked themselves a spot in the Big Game at the End
of the Season.
Going into the match, i gialloneri were without Matt Fowler, the last survivor of their 1990s
premiership hat-trick. For the men from Moira Shire, Big Fev needed ten goals
to beat the goal-scoring record for an O&M finals series, and eleven to
beat the record in a grand final. Brad Ottens was absent for what would have
been his fourth game of the season, owing to his commitments with the Geelong
VFL team in their grand final against Box Hill. A crowd of eleven thousand (one-fifth
of that which patronised the world-famous Henty Field Days) filed into the
Lavington Something Something Oval on a bright September-y day, including your
humble correspondent, who decided to Bring Tha Noise every time Albury scored a
goal by banging on the advertising signs at the far end of the field.
Pre-match entertainment was provided by
some guy who was on Australia’s Got
Factor or The X-Talent or some
such, who regaled the crowd with his Amateur Hour version of Stereophonics’
‘Dakota’. Topping last year’s act (man-about-television Brian Mannix belting
out ‘We Can Be Heroes’ from the back of a Holden ute) evidently proved
impossible for the organisers. After said Holden utes paraded local AFL
identities, hall of fame inductees, and under-14s best and fairest joint second
runners-up around the paddock, we were ready for some action.
The first quarter saw action at both ends.
Drew Barnes opened the scoring for the out-of-towners, but Albury led by nine
points at the break. Yarrawonga’s star forward began to personify his team’s
frustration when he began to engage his opponents in some argy-bargy of the
knee-in-stomach variety. Early in the second quarter, the Tigers hit their
highest lead for the match – sixteen points – and your humble correspondent was
quietly confident about their chances when they led by seven at the half.
Albury’s brilliant idea in the first half
was to flood Yarrawonga’s forward line, leaving their own attacking fifty-metre
arc as empty as Henty after the world-famous Field Days has left town. This
didn’t net them much of a lead, and when the Tigers players began to tire in
the second half, and their other brilliant tactical manoeuvre (having two
defenders chaperone Fevola) failed, It All Went Pete Tong for the eighteen-time
premiers.
In the third quarter, Yarrawonga started
playing that High Pressure Football that turned the entire nation purple when
the Dockers played it against Sydney the night before. Indeed, the stadium
seemed to turn more blue and white, as the entire population of the
Yarrawonga-Mulwala conurbation, who were in attendance, got rowdier. Albury
ended the quarter in the red, trailing by fifteen points at lemon time.
The ‘money quarter’, as our brothers across
the Pacific call it, also witnessed some action of the non-Sherrin-chasing
kind. There was the usual handbags-at-twenty-paces stuff between Fevola and
however many Albury defenders he wanted to take on, then a nice old brawl in
the Yarrawonga forward line which would have had Mr. Demetriou and the other
members of the PC Brigade frothing in their Collins Street skinny decaf lattés.
To top it off, Tigers enforcer Joel Mackie gave his opposite number the kind of
whack on the chin that you just don’t see nowadays outside of Greek parliamentary
debates.
For the last three-eighths of the match,
Yarrawonga piled on goal after goal while denying Albury any such privilege;
the Tigers’ last was at the six-minute mark of the third quarter. Albury’s
defence restricted Fevola to four goals, but the rest of the Yarrawonga side
picked up the slack.
The Magnificent Moira-gyars were…well,
magnificent, combining Fremantlesque pressure in defence with an ability to
slot them through from all points in the forward fifty and beyond. Their
fifteen-point lead extrapolated itself to thirty-six in the final quarter, and
the Pigeons sealed back-to-back premierships. Yarrawonga’s Drew Barnes, playing
in his tenth grand final in as many seasons (five for Nathalia and five for
Yarrawonga), was awarded the Did Simpson Medal as best on ground, after a
Toyota Magic Moments Ad-worthy performance, while Fevola cleared up any doubts
about his future within days of the match by committing himself to another two
seasons at the J. C. Lowe Oval.
The final score: Yarrawonga 13.12.90
defeated Albury 8.6.54.
And thus ends another season of the world’s
finest provincial football league. By winning three of the four encounters
between the Big Two (and two from three against the duopoly’s closest
challenger, Lavington), the mob from down the river proved themselves worthy
premiers.
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