By Davis Harrigan
Matthew Clark is a man on an important mission in season 2016. The Wantirna South Football Club look like a team that are hungry to move closer to the top of the ladder, after 2015 yielded six wins. A renewed fire and passion to take last year’s positives and apply them to what will be another demanding season has Clark excited about recent pre-season training.
“Most of our pre-season training has been around starting games well, and unlike last year we want to make sure that form continues,” he said.
“The early games set you up for the whole, so we know a good start is critical for us, coming off the way we finished last year.”
With no Doncaster in Division Two, the competition has burst wide open. However, Clark said he is not looking at the bigger picture just yet, rather keeping the focus on the Devils and creating a team that gels on-field.
“We’ve got goals and that is to play the highest level of football we can…where we’ve had a lot of success is keeping a short-sighted focus and not getting ahead of ourselves,” he said. “If we prepare ourselves for our next opponent both on and off-field, that’s a step to our success; our whole focus has been on round one and we’ll move from there.”
Clark said the exposure and promotion to Division Two was a valuable learning experience – one that will be beneficial to the players and coaching staff.
“The players know what effort is required all the time but we sustained key injuries along the way (last season),” he said.
“We know the style of footy that will win us more games which will mean we’re more aggressive with the way we use the football…we defended really well last year but we wanted to score better.”
The new crop of players, whom Clark said had played at the likes of the Eastern Ranges, had already slotted into the club culture with their football nous.
“What we’ve noticed is that they’re really good decision makers and can hit targets under a game pressure at training, so we’re expecting that to be replicated on gameday,” he said.
“What we probably lacked last year was outside ball usage, but with a lot of younger players coming in we’ve found we can better execute once we have the ball there, we can now transition really well and that’s excited the whole group.
“There’s also some more middle age experience, and as a group we have six or seven players who are returning from injury.”
The forward line has begun to create a solid platform upon which to build for the season, and will be bolstered by the return of the club’s power goalkicker.
“We lost our leading forward, Daniel Beddome, to an injury last year and Ange Papa went down in round three against Doncaster,” Clark said, but indicated they would return this year.
“The focus is on having multiple goalscorers, and looking for seven to eight options; last year we only had three or four.”
Andrew Teakel will be handing the captain and leadership reigns onto someone else this season, and Clark said there is a small handful in the playing group that can step up into the driver’s seat.
“Andrew’s captained us for the last four years but he brought it to the table and wanted someone else to take on the role,” he said.
“We’ve got three or four really good candidates who throughout the pre-season have shown us they could do it…we want to give the younger and middle generation to take the club forward.”