AROUNDTHEGROUNDS
with ANTHONY BARBAGALLO
sport@oclife.com.au
Winter Orange Basketball Grand Final Results
Senior Orange Football Grand Finals
Boys Primary Division 1: The Trojans clinched grand final silverware with a 31-21 win against the Cardinals.
C-Grade: Ex-Services clinched the C-Grade title after a thrilling 5-3 penalty shootout victory against Waratah Old Boys. Waratahs were about to win the title with three minutes left, but a late Ex-Services equaliser changed the entire outcome.
Girls Primary Division: The Mystics Purple won their grand final after comfortably beating United Thunder 30-11. Boys High School Division 1: The Rim Rockers claimed the Division 1 premiership with a 48-28 win against John Cook last Monday. Rim Rockers are the minor and major premiers. Girls High School Division: Slabtastic marched on to secure the title after beating Wildcats Contemporary Homes 28-14.
B-Grade: Saints FC won the second division trophy after beating CYMS 1-0.
4th Division: Waratah United upset Canobolas Rangers Pink with a 1-0 win to secure the 4th Division Championship.
Women’s Football
Orange Toyota Men Division 1: After claiming the minor premiership, the Bulls won the grand prize against the Trojans with a 75-55 victory.
Last Saturday, Barnstoneworth United cruised to a 9-1 victory against Waratah Blue to claim the Orange Open Women’s Football Division title. Star striker Alex Quick bagged four goals, capping off an incredible team performance.
Orange Toyota Women Division 1: The Sportspower Rap Gods clinched a thrilling 42-40 win against the second-placed Vipers to take out the championship title.
The Women’s Barnies squad were in a league of their own in 2022, taking out the minor premiership and achieving the top prize in last weekend’s grand final. Congratulations Barnies!
A-Grade football final
Soaring success for Hawks Ecoscape debut Debutant U13s netball squad, Hawks Ecoscape, soared to success in the 2022 season, claiming the minor and major premiership in the U13s Red Division.
The Hawks were out for vengeance after their setback in the first week of the finals and their determination saw them cruise to a 38-19 win to claim the U13s Red Division premiership.
The new squad, coached by Erin Losanno, had an incredible regular season, topping their division with 33 points and nine wins from 13 rounds.
Jessica White, a parent of one of the Hawks players, is impressed at how far this new netball team has come in its first season of existence.
But in the first week of the finals, Hawks Ecoscape lost to second-placed CYMS Storm in a close 32-27 thriller forcing the team into another preliminary final game against the KWS Twizzlers. After a hard-fought 28-18 victory over KWS, the minor premiers secured a spot in the grand final and a rematch with their CYMS Storm rivals
“This is the first year these girls, from a bunch of different schools, have played netball together,” Jessica said. “Erin Losanno has been a great coach with the girls, dedicating a lot of time with them in the lead-up to the grand final,” she continued. I hope this Hawks side will continue to perform well in 2023!” she added. Congratulations to the Hawks on a stellar season!
BARRACKER THE
PRESSURE AND KEEPING YOUR HEAD IN BIG SPORTS MATCHES “If you can keep your head, when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you…” These opening lines from Rudyard Kipling’s famous poem, If, applies as much to 21st century sport as to 19th century ideals of manhood. While almost all sports (except WWE wrestling) now encourage and promote fans keeping their calm and supporting fair play, sportsmanship, and good behaviour towards opposing competitors, teams, and match officials, what about the players themselves? As well as a physical test of fitness, will to win, and skill, sports contests are also an emotional and temperamental journey for participants. “Keeping your head when all around you are losing theirs” is almost an impossibility for some highly competitive and driven individuals, for whom winning and losing is the criteria by which they are ultimately judged. The recent explosive semi-final between Australian rugby league’s two most bitter rivals, the Souths Sydney Rabbitohs and Sydney Roosters (formerly Eastern Suburbs), showed how much real emotions can boil over even among highly trained professional sportsmen. A record seven sin binnings, five player concussions, and two player bans, featured in the clash in which foul play seemed about to boil over in almost every tackle. The 80-minute game had so many stoppages for injury, warnings, sin-binnings, and reviews of incidents, that the game actually lasted for nearly two hours. It’s easy to say that players should keep their temper in control at all times — for the example they set for children as well as their own self-interest — but pressure does funny things to people. While many pundits pointed to bad boy Latrell Mitchell — the Souths full-back and ex-Rooster who broke a former team-mate’s cheekbone in three places in a horrendous tackle 12 months
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previously — football guru, Phil Gould pointed out that Mitchell was one of the few players on the field (this time) to keep his head. His cool thinking, milking of penalties, peerless pass selection, and perfect kicking, ultimately saw the Rabbitohs triumph over their hated rivals. Even at the lowest level of sport, pressure to perform and expectation of success, can play funny tricks on people. I once played in a grand final in my mid-teens, in which we were the prohibitive favourites, only having been beaten once during the regular season. Our coach — who, until that time had seemed as singularly a stable, solid, and unimaginative figure as one could possibly imagine — decided to introduce faceslapping of each other, at the time favoured by the terrifying Western Suburbs Magpies, as our pregame motivator. Players who had been phlegmatically cool-headed and nonchalant all year, suddenly wanted to fight every opponent, argued with the referee the whole game, bombed tries that a blindfolded six-year-old could have scored, as our star centre, took the field intoxicated. While we lost the game, it proved an invaluable lesson in what the stress of expectation does to people on a sports field, and in life generally. I’ve since played in a half a dozen football, touch, and cricket deciders at various times, and it’s amazing how often those who seem the most relaxed, often buckle first in the big game. They say in football (soccer), that a score of 2-0 up is the hardest to defend. This is, supposedly, because it just relaxes the winning team that tiny much, that any score by their opponents, seems to upset the whole equilibrium of the match. This was shown in the famous 1970 World Cup quarter final in Mexico, when England blew a 2-0 lead against West Germany in the last 20 minutes with West Germany eventually triumphing 3-2 in extra time. Pressure, it’s a funny thing.