By BRYAN MITCHELL
TAC CUP
REVIEW – Round 12
THE Power just kept flowing through a torrential storm as Gippsland smashed Eastern Ranges by 45 points.
The region suffered heavy rain earlier in the week but Traralgon had an extra fifteen millimetres overnight to ensure that it was always going to be a battle for both sides to play any form of cohesive football.
Going into this crucial match the Power had been greatly strengthened by the return of key defender Christian Buykx-Smith who had been missing due to injury since Round 3 of the 2014 season.
The match opened with the sort of intensity that coach Leigh Brown had asked for and some of that intense pressure up forward resulted in Josh Patullo setting up Aloysio Ferreira kicking an important goal.
More of that forward pressure resulted in Power ‘hard-man’ Nash Holmes kicking a fine goal and, for the next twenty minutes, the match became an intense arm wrestle.
By the first change the Power led by sixteen points but, more importantly, had kept the Ranges scoreless. At the long break the Power had extended their lead to twenty-nine points and had ensured that the Ranges remained scoreless.
Conditions were getting worse as the temperature fell and the rainfall intensified. Some hard work up forward by the Ranges saw them score a goal on the twenty minute mark of the term but Holmes again did the hard things to allow Argento to reply for the Power.
In the opening minutes of the last term some more intense work by Holmes allowed Bunyip’s emerging star Tom Papley to mark and goal but, after ten minutes, the match was finally called off with the Power forty-five points up.
On a day when hard-nosed play would dominate, Nash Holmes made the match his own in a superb display of his typically fierce and competitive brand of football. He had nearly 50 possessions in the thick of the heaviest action as well as applying fourteen tackles with his unique brand of one-on-one play, providing countless important clearances in the toughest contests and was still going hard as the siren sounded.
With three fine goals as a forward, Papley might have been content with his day’s work. However, as he has done so well in recent matches, he applied the same work rate when playing in the midfield and added his own brand of intensity in the heavier contests to tackle hard and win the ball with his fierce attacking, mode of play.
On a day when Leigh Brown and his line-coaches had asked for the ultimate team performance, they would have been delighted with the fact that so many of the boys applied themselves to the team goals for the entire match.
The ultimate test will occur this weekend when the Power take on the TAC Cup’s top side, the Oakleigh Chargers, at Morwell.
TAC CUP SCOREBOARD
GIPPSLAND POWER 2.4 4.5 7.5 8.6 (54)
EASTERN RANGES 0.0 0.0 1.3 1.3 (9)
GIPPSLAND POWER
Goals: T. Papley 3, E. Park, A. Carr, A. Ferreira, N. Argento, B. Olsson. Best: N. Holmes, A. Carr, T. Papley, C. Ambler, D. Keilty, A. Ferreira.
EASTERN RANGES
Goals: L. Jeffs, Best: A. Cotte, L. Hannon, J. Parsons, N. Evans, M. Burt, P. Klep.
