Straight From The Sauce – Round 2 League & Reserves

A week is a longtime in footy, but a 6-point win against Norwood in Riley Knight’s 100^th game and winning all 4 games in the quadruple header at Maughan Thiem Kia Oval, is a day we will remember for a long time.

After feeling like last week, we actually closed the game out pretty well against Central but just to be beaten by a perfect play, we did everything we could to keep Norwood in it after putting ourselves in a good spot by being up by 14 points.

Credit to the boys for our second half, 10 goals to 4 after a really disappointing first half showed the character and resilience this playing group has displayed all pre-season, so it’s great they got their reward with a win.

It was great to see some of our developing players stand up in Kade Herbert, Jordan Lukac, Jett Hasting, Bailey Hann, Lukas Cooke to name a few and not always just relying on our senior players to dig us out of the hole. We showed in a 20-minute period that when we get our game going we are really hard to stop, we just need to show this for longer and more consistently in games.

Better players on the day were Kade, Jordan, Riley Knight, Kobe Mutch, Daniel Sladojevic and Jack Hayes.

We go into Gather Round at 1-1 playing some decent footy, but still some areas we can work on so we will get to training and look forward to our Good Friday clash with West Adelaide at Hisense Stadium.

Enjoy the weekend off.

Sauce

Sam Jacobs – Eagles Senior Coach

Coming off a good round 1 win against Central District and heading into round 2 against Norwood back at Maughan Thiem Kia Oval, this group of young men were full of confidence and it showed from the start.

With a fast start, we felt we controlled the game for about 90% of the time, with a little lapse at the start of the third quarter where we were slow to start and had 3 quick goals in 4 minutes kicked on us. The great thing about this group is they were able to respond quickly and get the game back on our terms.

Blake Hansen performed extremely well and led from the front through the midfield, as did Isaac McGrath on the wing. It was great to see David Brinker-Ritchie and Jordan Moore back out on the field after being out for some time, and I’m sure they will be knocking down the door for League selection sooner rather than later.

Going into the gather round bye being 2-0 is great validation for this extremely young group. It shows them that what we have been training over the pre season is working and the layers are hopefully only going to continue to be added throughout the year.

Looking forward to getting back into it in 2 weeks time on Good Friday when we take on West Adelaide at Richmond.

Shane Hancock – Eagles Development Coach