ON paper a 14-13-97 to 5-9-39 loss at the hands of the Bathurst Bushrangers Rebels may not look like a good afternoon of football for the Bathurst Giants, but coach Mark Kennedy still found plenty of positives on Saturday.
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Not only was he missing a bulk of his older, more experienced players for the match against the Central West AFL competition leaders, but the Giants also spent a period playing a man short.
However, when former league best and fairest Paul Jenkins was sent off in the second term, the Giants managed to adjust before fatigue impacted them.
Given the side the Giants fielded was largely made up of under 18s players and had no ruckmen – both James Kennedy and Zac Bayliss amongst the absentees – that certainly ranked as a positive.
“We lost Jenko in that second quarter, so we were down to 17 men for 20 minutes, but the positive thing was, we matched them without having Jenko there in the middle,” Kennedy said.
“They didn’t score a goal during that time, so the young blokes did really well.
“We knew we had to control the football, so I played two extra bodies behind the ball to start with and they didn’t really react to it.
“What did kill us was Peter Grundy finding that ball out of the middle and Bill Watterson. Our back line played really well and was able to nullify their larger forwards, but we couldn’t nullify their run through the middle.
“It did end up taking a toll on us because we were down to two on the bench, but there were certainly a lot of positives to come from that game.”
