Abbey Field Heads for Open Pastures.
It was a tough day out for the Diesels on Sunday, with the ladies tackle side rescuing the Diesels from a white wash on the day with their 46-0 win over the Temora Dragons, establishing themselves as clear front runners for the competition.
The first grade men went down 40-0 against the Dragons whilst the Taggers fought until the end, getting beaten 30-4 in the end.
President of the Diesels, David Holt, discussed the Diesels day with the Independent.
“We just couldn’t quite capitalise on a few things in first grade, there were a few patches where we played alright but overall a frustrating game,” Holt said.
“The First Graders put alot of effort into the game, it’s just unfortunate we are sort of a little bit out-gunned and went in a little bit underdone with the disruption as far as Damian having a heart attack and the disruption that that caused. We also had a few injuries within our senior ranks after the game against Brothers, and unfortunately, we went into the game under-manned. You can’t take away anything from any player, they didn’t leave anything out on the field that’s for sure.
“Damian is on the mend. He came and watched a bit of the game. He just has to take each day as it comes.”
Willis, who was featured in the Independent just last week, managed a storied career in rugby league scoring over 350 career tries in his time in Group 9 alone, let alone his Sydney career.
Holt thought the league tag side gave a good sight.
“Temora ended up getting away from them, but again that’s the girl’s confidence in coming up against those better sides. Temora has always been in that top two, top three positions. For a very long time, they’ve had a good team and they continue to build on that season to season,” he said.
“The girls are playing with a lack of confidence within themselves. If they can find some it will go along way for them.
“They just have to turn up to training and work out their plan and go from there.”
Holt was ecstatic with the ladies tackle’s third straight win.
“The girls this week started a little bit slow but the second half was phenomenal. Their structure of both defence and attack sees them playing some quality rugby league.
“They will keep going. Unfortunately, Albury has pulled out. I believe that will make seven teams involved in the competition and they will continue following the Group Nine draw.
“The girls have a bye this week, so they get a weekend off because they come up against Kangaroos and then the following week we are up in Tumut, which has a ladies’ tackle side that is going pretty good as well.”
Coach of the women’s tackle Simon Vanzanten believes his side is the team to beat in the com-petition.
“We played Estella Storm earlier in the year and got a win. Estella has been the team to beat for a couple of years. From there we started a bit shaky and a bit nervous and we kicked into gear late, but this week we made a big effort to try and have high intensity early and we did but we just dropped a couple of balls, but then our defence was awesome for the first 10 minutes. We kind of won. We set the win up from that early 10minutes even though we started to slow our defence was awesome and our girls worked together then the opposition didn’t want the ball to be honest and then our girls kicked into gear and put on a bit of a show, which was good,” Simon said.
“For me, I’ve coached rugby league my whole life, but a lot of these girls are like sponges, so week in and week out they are improving. Some of the girls that weren’t very comfortable making a few tackles are now trying to tackle some of the biggest girls in the comp and they are running over the top of people and start running their lines and starting to get a real good team atmosphere and starting to build nicely and to be honest, I think we’re going to be hard to beat because they’ve got a good mix of a couple of older middles who are pretty aggressive and then some really quick younger outside backs.
“It’s a combination of both and to be real, that’s the hardest thing to manage.We’ve got eight girls that play both each week. They’ve got a game in between, but then they have got to warm up again.
“Round one was 33 degrees and we still beat Southcity pretty convincingly in the first round and to play two full games of footy in the heat was pretty impressive, but what I’ve been trying to do, I’ve got a few other girls that don’t play both and I’m trying to get them to take a bit more responsibility to take a bit more of the load off the girls that are playing two games.
“It’s a bit different because we actually did that in a trial in the pre-season and they backed straight up after their game and it was a bit all over the shop early, but with a game in between they can have a half an hour break and then we can go and warm up in a bit of a different session because it tackles not tag and then gets the girls focused again on tackling and we are just making sure they are very hydrated and stuff so they can get through the games.
“It’s a bit hard to gauge how some of the other teams are going, like Tumut and Gundagai, that was their first game of footy on the weekend. They’ve had a bye and a forfeit each, so that was their first game of footy when they got to play against each other and they’re both a real unknown, but thinking that Tumut will be pretty competitive because they’ve got a Nines competition in the preseason that they have, so some of those girls have been pretty handy to play up there, so I think they are going to be pretty handy, that’s if they get to play because I think a lot of their girls on the other teams play Rugby Union as well and they won the premiership last year and they’ve got a big game for them on the same day so we’re hoping that we still actually get a game of footy.
“They’ve been trying to work on this for a little bit. I took a younger team away to Albury a few years ago now to play in the first tackle competition and then last year when they included the non-competitive stuff, I helped Gavin Lamb who was coaching the league tag and we have done some of that, so when teams had a team to play tackle, we played some shorter versions of tackle last year to start getting it introduced so we could start having a competition this year.
“It’s a little bit disappointing that there are a few teams that haven’t got tackle teams because I think the competition we were looking at having two divisions this year, but I think if they introduce an Under 17’s competition next year and the first grade, it will be a goer and I think there’ll be more because of the younger girls naturally are playing more tackle -they’ll come through in the next couple of years so I think there’ll be enough numbers in the next year or two to have a couple of women’s competitions coming through, which is pretty cool and exciting because of the pathways they’ve got to go through to the NRL now.
“The main lot of the girls that all played a lot last year and had a bit of a try to see if they liked it, but now, because we have been successful and they can see the atmosphere, there’s been one or two extras that have comeback on board to have a run because they can see that the comradeship and the teamwork that we have got going on is pretty cool.
“One of our better players this week was Viv Bedford, she’s handy. She was a good pick-up for us. She played for the NSW Police rugby league and we were lucky enough to get her and she plays in the middle and she had a blinder last weekend.
“Abbey Field, who’s a local girl, she is really fast and she had her best game of the year and her defence was unreal as well.
“The three Foley girls, Kate, Abby and Claire, have been strong for us each week. They all come from football families and have been pretty awesome each week.”
The Diesels taggers and first-grade men travel to Wagga on Saturday. Men kick off at 2:35 pm.
-Tully Potts
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