AUSTRALIAN RULES
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It’s a win, but not the most convincing one for the Bathurst Bushrangers, who opened their Central West AFL account with an away victory over the Cowra Blues on Saturday.
Following a scrappy opening quarter, in which the Bushrangers led by just two points at its conclusion, the Bathurst side ended up running out 17-19-121 to 10-4-64 winners.
The Bushrangers outscored the Blues 73 to 27 in the second half as they found more composure as the match wore on.
Co-coach Matt Archer said it wasn’t the finest showing from the side, but was happy enough to be on the right end of the score card.
“A win’s a win. It’s not an ideal start and it leaves us with lots to work on. We can’t afford to keep coming out slow like we did here. Cowra are a team with some good veteran players in there and when we made some silly early errors they capitalised on them,” he said.
“We all know that we’re going to have to step it up. It didn’t really kick off for us until the third quarter. We recovered and regathered ourselves at half-time.
“Defence has been our strength over the last three to four years, though they’ll also agree it wasn’t their best game either. There were a couple of silly mistakes, but we put all the trust in the world in these guys and they’re reliable as anything.”
The score was 27 to 25 in the favour of the Bushrangers at the quarter time break and the visitors kicked only one goal more than Cowra in the following period.
The Bushrangers kicked into action for the final half, playing two consistent final quarters in which they kicked five goals each.
Kim Reid was the stand-out for the Blues with his tally of six goals, accounting for more than half of the Cowra total.
One encouraging thing for Archer was to see five Bushrangers players finish with three goals next to their names.
“It’s a good sort of spread. There were a few of the younger guys in that group like Jacob Davy and Michael Long,” he said.
“They were very strong throughout the day and they ended up being the ones carrying our more experienced guys.”
BATHURST BUSHRANGERS 17-19-121 (Matt Archer 3, Jacob Davy 3, Emmitt Carr-Smith 3, Michael Long 3, Cameron Richards 3, Tom Reagan, Tom Markey) defeated COWRA BLUES 10-4-64 (Kim Reid 6, Brad McLeish, Francis Bright, Nicholas Collett, Aaron Thorn)
