Last Sunday, your humble correspondent
witnessed the deciding match of the 2014 Ovens and Murray Football League
season, the sixth in succession between Albury (the Tigers, playing in black
with a yellow sash) and Yarrawonga (the Pigeons, playing in navy and white
hoops). The league’s two power clubs, boasting a combined six hundred and
sixty-six games of AFL experience between them, played out a thriller in front
of a healthy crowd in a match which showcased the best of our great game.
This season, the Tiger ranks were bolstered
by the arrival of the O’hAilpin brothers, Setanta and Aisake, late of Carlton,
and Brayden O’Hara, a midfielder from Central Districts. The squad, one of the
finest ever assembled in country football, took home the minor premiership with
sixteen wins, one loss, and one match abandoned (the season opener at home to
Yarrawonga, in which young Albury player James McQuillan was airlifted to
Melbourne after suffering a spinal injury, which left him a quadriplegic.) Yarrawonga
finished third on the ladder, but two wins over second-placed Lavington in the
qualifying and preliminary finals (of a McIntyre Final Five, if you’re playing
along at home) put them into the Big Game at the End of the Season.
Before the match, as your humble
correspondent enjoyed some hot chips and a can of a prominent black fizzy
beverage, we were treated to a brilliant rendition of Hunters and Collectors’
‘Holy Grail’ by local performer Jason Ivill, a song which ought to become the
antipodean version of ‘Abide With Me’ and played before the grand final of
every football league in the Commonwealth. Legendary Brisbane Lions forward
Jonathan Brown, en route to the
Brownlow, tossed the coin and we were off. Or, more precisely, Yarrawonga were off
– the out-of-towners scored the first three goals of the match, two of them
from the boot of our old mucker Brendan Fevola, and it was looking like they
would take home their third successive premiership. The nerves of the Tigers
faithful were settled, however, by a flurry of goals, one each to Dean Polo
(ex-Richmond and -St. Kilda) and Andy Carey, and two to Setanta O’hAilpin. The
minor premiers led at quarter time by just four points.
The Tigers’ ascendancy continued in the
second term. Despite some poor clearances from defence, they out-goaled the
Pigeons five to four. The highlight of the quarter for Albury was an
eighteenth-minute running goal for indigenous speedster Lonnie Hampton; for
Yarrawonga, it was the leaping grab and subsequent set shot conversion by Fevola
in the thirtieth minute which trimmed the margin to twelve points at the half.
Despite some minor outbreaks of guernsey-pulling, the match calmed down
somewhat in this quarter, and that ingredient which makes country football so
delicious – The Biff – would be sadly absent in the second half.
The long break came, and your humble
correspondent tucked into a hot dog (our hosts having run out of chips and warm
pies) and his second can of the black fizzy beverage. When the teams returned
from the sheds, it was again the Pigeons who came out of the blocks firing.
You-know-who scored two quick goals within nine minutes to tie the scores at
nine goals seven apiece. I gialloneri
could manage only behinds in response, allowing Yarrawonga to take the lead
with a goal in the twenty-first minute by Jeremy O’Brien. With the Pigeons’
defence keeping the brothers from the Rebel County relatively quiet, the men
from Moira Shire smelled blood in the water, but two goals from O’Hara in time
on gave the locals an eight-point lead at lemon time.
What followed was a final quarter to
remember. A ninth-minute Fevola shot on goal was ruled a behind by the goal
umpire without benefit of score review; Albury led by fifteen. Andy Carey
marked on the fifty-metre arc and played on to O’Hara in the eleventh minute;
the Croweater’s goal (enlarging the margin to twenty-one points) would be
Albury’s last. Tigers full-back Michael Thompson got a hand to a Fevola soccer
one minute later, and Albury led by twenty despite Fevola’s rather in-your-face
protestations to the goal umpire.
Two Yarrawonga goals and then a behind narrowed
the margin to eight points. The ‘Big Mo’, as George H. W. Bush called it, was
with them as they yet again moved the Sherrin goalwards into the waiting hands
of Fevola in the twenty-seventh minute. Situated twenty minutes out and
straight in front of goal, and realising that the siren could blow at any
second, the former Dancing with the Stars
contestant played on, taking two steps to his right and snapping around his
body, somehow missing to the right by about one metre. The siren did indeed
blow soon after, followed closely by the triumphal strains of ‘Oh we’re from
Tigerland / A fighting fury we’re from Tigerland’.
The best defensive football is played on
relatively large ovals in dry and warm conditions, and this match was a
textbook demonstration of this fact. In a year in which the AFL’s average score
per team per match has dropped to the lowest level since 1968 due to the expert
application of pressure by defences, the O and M’s Big Two showed that they too
adhere to the tenets of Roosism-Lyonism; the air was alive with the glorious
sounds of pigskin being smothered and imported talent being unceremoniously
thrown onto the turf. Although Fevola and Setanta O’hAilpin bagged six and four
goals respectively, they would have had more if not for the efforts of the backmen
who kept them quiet, Thompson and Luke Packer of Albury and Connor Hargreaves
and Marcus McMillan of Yarrawonga. The latter became, at just nineteen years of
age, the first player to be awarded the Did Simpson Medal in a losing side;
having already represented country Victoria at under-19 level, he undoubtedly
has great things ahead of him.
The flag is Albury’s nineteenth, and after
two years of grand final heartbreak, the Ovens and Murray premiership cup has
once again taken up residence on the side of the border where it belongs. But
what next for the league, and for the Tigers? Six consecutive Albury-Yarrawonga
grand finals has brought equalisation to the top of the agenda, and it seems
likely that some sort of points system will soon be implemented, limiting the
ability of big clubs to recruit players with AFL and state league experience.
(A working group of local football identities has already drawn up a scheme, as
detailed
mid-season in the Border Mail.)
After the demise of the Bendigo Gold left
the VFL with fifteen clubs, the Weekly
Times published a non-story
speculating about Albury replacing them. Of course the club denies any
interest, but this club deserves to seek greener pastures, and North Ballarat
have already demonstrated how a country club can make the jump. One of these
Septembers, we might be hearing ‘Yellow and Black’ blaring out across the
Docklands.
Albury 13.13.91 – Yarrawonga 12.12.84
Goals: S. O’hAilpin 4, O’Hara 3, Mitchell
2, Carey, Hampton, A. O’hAilpin, Polo (Alb.); Fevola 6, Pettifer 2, Ednie,
Gorman, O’Brien, Seymour (Yarr.)
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