By Connor Schmidtke
As the Eastern Football Netball League community prepares to enter the first week of Senior Men’s finals footy, teams across every division are fighting to extend their season and take a step closer to premiership glory.
One of those is Silvan, who despite cantering away to the Division Four minor premiership, will head into the finals on uneven footing after a second loss to Surrey Park on Saturday, their opponents this weekend.
For the Cats, this weekend will be a chance to capitalise on their dominance during the regular season and quash claims that Surrey Park are the new premiership favourites.
The Cats won 14 of their 16 games during the season, finishing with a staggering percentage of 280, a stark improvement on 2021, where they finished fifth when the season wound up.
Led by head coach, Trent Martin, Silvan have been building towards this type of improvement for the former Blue’s entire five-year period at the club.
“It’s been massive, I’ve been here five years now, so I knew the improvement was going to come.
“I was reminded early on in my coaching that you don’t go from rock bottom to premiers overnight.
“It was probably a four or five-year plan, we had to factor covid in, but we were expecting some big improvement this year and it’s been great.”
One major factor behind Silvan’s explosion this season has been their offensive dominance over the rest of Division Four.
The Cats averaged over 150 points per game, scoring over 200 on three separate occasions whilst only slipping under 100 points in two games across the year. They scored a total of around 2500 points over their 16 games this season, with the next best side in the division scoring around 1000 less than that.
Martin said that personnel was a big driver of their offensive performances.
“Personnel is a big factor.
“Having Justin Ficorilli come to the club, in combination with Leigh Kimpton it was always going to be hard to shut down two forwards like that,
“Obviously Matt Low and Billy Rattray, a couple young kids through the 19’s system we had. You can kick a lot of scores when you have a lot of good players, and that obviously helped.”
An interesting note that Martin brought up was the importance of getting the balance right in his starting 22. Silvan have been in a great position all year, having a strong reserves side that will also feature in finals this season.
“We made it clear that even blokes who are in our best five-to-ten players, if they come back through injury, we made a consistent rule that everyone has to come back through the reserves.
“It’s an added pressure on spots we’ve built over five years of being up there and at the end of the day, you pick your best 18 coming into the first final. We’ve probably been a few players short the last couple of weeks, so we’ll look to build the personnel this week.
“Obviously, our reserves still being alive makes it handy, because they can still play and continue to get run into their legs.”
Silvan are now in the unique position where they will face Surrey Park in their first final, the same team they played in the final round of the regular season.
Surrey Park have become something of a bogey side for Silvan this year, having beaten them in two of their three encounters during the season, including the final round. Surrey Park were the only side in Division Four to beat Silvan this year, whilst also being the only team to hold the Cats to less than 100 points in a game.
Martin says that despite the edge Surrey Park have had, it gave him and the coaching staff an idea of how to counteract their style of play.
“We had some good senior players out the last time we played them. We’ve got a nine-year hoodoo at their ground as well and we lost their twice again this year.
“Not looking to make excuses, but we’ll also take confidence from the first meeting when we beat them well on our oval. We’ll change some personnel too.
“They put all their cards on the table and showed the template on how to beat us, so we just need to coach against that and see how we go.”
Silvan and Surrey Park will do battle on Saturday at East Burwood, with the winner moving straight through to the grand final in two weeks’ time.