FOR the first time in three years, Western Branch has earned bragging rights as the best under 13 boys country soccer representative side in the state.
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Western won the 2017 Country Cup, an annual prize contested between itself, Riverina and Southern as part of the state titles each year.
Coached by Bathurst’s Callum Christie, who was assisted by Lachlan Thomas, Western finished an impressive six points clear of its two country rivals at the Griffith-hosts titles.
“It’s however many points you get overall in the whole table, over the whole competition, and whoever gets the most out of the country teams gets the Country Cup,” Christie said.
“I don’t think that Western’s won it in a while, so it was a really good achievement for the under 13 boys to finally get that.”
Western played eight games over the course of the five-day tournament, with its two victories coming against its country rivals.
Christie’s side beat Southern 2-1 and Riverina 1-0.
“That really helped us with the points and it really helped our confidence going into the other games, winning those two,” the coach said.
Against the metropolitan outfits Western found the going tougher. However, the side did warm to the task as the tournament unfolded.
Western managed a nil-all draw with Metro East, suffered a narrow 1-0 loss against Metro West and managed to find the back of the net in its games with Metro Far North and Metro South to rank seventh overall in the state. It was an improvement from last year’s eighth placing.
“Our first game against a metro side we lost by a fair amount of goals, but it was just that real shock to the boys I think because a lot of them hadn’t played at that high level yet,” Christie said.
“Once they started getting in to the movement of the game and the speed, that’s when we started to fight back in the next games.
“I was extremely happy with how we went. I wasn’t too confident that we could beat some of the Sydney teams, but I was surprised with how well we played and how short of a goal difference there was against most teams.”
The Western side included a number of Bathurst players, with Ethan Comerford, Caiden Grimmett, Sam Johnson, Sean Farraway and Alastair Crane-French in action.
Johnson and Comerford were amongst Western’s goal scorers, but Christie was pleased with the effort of all of his players.
“Alastair and Sam hadn’t really played at a higher level before and watching them in the first game it was a bit of a shock to them. But once they started getting going, they really stepped up and showed that could play in the top ranking with the other boys who play [Western NSW] Mariners,” he said.