Devils do it the hard way in Williamson's 150th

The Devils helped David Williamson celebrate his 150th game for the club. President, Chris Ryan congratulated Ravo before the game for the loyalty, hard work and fun he has brought to the Devils. The Devils needed a good win against Burleigh who is always a really tough opponent. In Round 2 the Devils kicked 10.1 in the first quarter with a final score of 20.11. Whilst both teams have significant personnel changes since then, the expectation was that the Devils should win if they bring the same intensity of the week before.

The quarter started with the Devils in control. The basic skills were quite often lacking early and when they continued, there were some worries especially when the intensity just seemed to be lacking at times. Our skills in front of goal let us down as we sat on 3 points with the quarter almost gone. There was no apparent reason for ordinary execution of our skills other than the pressure that Burleigh brings to a game. To their credit, Burleigh made the most of their forward entries and was taking control. In the last 5 minutes, Boyd kicked 2 and Rolla 1 for the Devils to take a slender lead at the first break.

The second quarter was just as frustrating to watch but to the boy’s credit, they kept at the game and a couple of goals from DJ and Boyd gave us control at the long break. It was the frustrating misses in front of goal that could have hurt us, but 4-7 to 2-2 did highlight that we had the majority of play and if we could rectify our basic errors, the foundation was there to win the game. The winter weather was perfect for footy and there was no explanation for the skill errors in this regard.

The 3rd quarter started with the Devils in complete control of the game where the play was consistently in our forward half. Dom Wili was concussed and this meant that Felsy had to ruck on his own for a quarter and a half, just like the last time we played. Frustratingly, our domination of play was not rewarded with goals and we could only manage 7 behinds. Burleigh, to their credit fought against this pressure well and was able to get a goal against the run of play. A couple of minutes later they were able to break our zone and stream into their forward line with 4 onto 1 and run in to an open goal. They were to do this again and the momentum was changing and they went to the final break with 1 more goal than the Devils and only 5 points down.

There was plenty of reason to worry at the break and early on our inaccur

acy continued. Burleigh managed another goal and then Zach Templeton was able to finally kick accurately for the Devils. We managed a slender lead for most of the quarter until Matt Rolla snapped an impossible goal from the pocket to give us the breathing space we needed. To win by 14 points with 14 more scoring shots will not win us finals games, so we need to improve going forward.

Yeronga: 3.4, 7.11, 7.18, 9.23 (77)

Burleigh: 3.1, 5.3, 8.7, 9.9 (63)

Goals kickers: Boyd 4, Declan Jordan, Matthew Rolla 2, Zach Templeton

Best Players: David Williamson, Matthew Johnson, Kyle Juracic, Brendan Davis, Robert Butler, Matthew Fels, Chris Lyon, Zach Templeton, Jack Lush