THE Bathurst Bushrangers will get their first look at Young for 2014 when they host the Saints in round five of the Central West AFL tomorrow at George Park.
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The home side takes an unblemished three-from-three record into the game and will start as unbackable favourites against a team still finding their feet in their return to the top grade.
To date the Saints do have one encouraging win from their three games, a nine-point triumph over Cowra in round two, but either side of that things have been less encouraging.
They opened with a 206-39 thrashing at the hands of Dubbo, and in their last game they were hammered by 204 points when they faced Orange.
Bushrangers co-coach Brett Archer admitted that he has plenty of sympathy and admiration for the Saints given their situation.
“I think what they’ve done is exceptional,” he said.
“For them to come up into firsts when they are asked to by the league, to find the numbers to do it and to get a win within their first few games, that’s something that I admire.
“But we will still go out there this weekend and play a hard game against them, hopefully they improve as the year goes on because it is great for the competition to have an extra team and you want everyone to be strong.”
After last Saturday’s representative match between Central West and Northern Riverina, Bathurst are counting the cost with skipper Matt Archer certain to miss tomorrow’s game and probably more with a knee injury.
In all likelihood if the Bushrangers play to something close to their best tomorrow they will win, and Brett Archer admits that with some niggles starting to manifest themselves, he has one eye on a big clash down the track.
“At this stage Orange look like the big danger, but we don’t have another game against them until June 14. Before then we’ve got Young, Dubbo and a bye,” he said.
“When you face the fact that there are a couple of teams who are struggling a little bit, it is hard to be looking ahead and thinking about that game.
“So, to tell the truth, we will probably try and rest a few of our key players that have some minor injury issues and make sure they are fresh and ready to go for that game.”
For all that though, the coach did stress that his team are not going to be taking anything for granted once the siren sounds at the start of tomorrow’s game.
“We did speak on Tuesday about the issue of complacency, you can never take any opponent too lightly and you want to keep going forward as a team rather than going backwards because you’ve had the wrong approach to a game,” Brett Archer said.
“All I’ve seen of Young this year was what I saw of one or two of their players at the rep game last week.
“Samuel Herzich was very impressive all game against Northern Riverina so he’s a player we have to watch.”
The Bushrangers host Young from 2.30pm today.
