By Dongyun Kwon
It is much more thrilling when facing a rival in an important match.
Healesville Seniors faced their biggest rival Warburton-Millgrove, leaving one more step to lift the flag on Sunday 15 September.
The Bloods dominated the ball throughout the grand final match and were successful in making the last step to grab the trophy.
Healesville senior coach Ryan Webster, who has coached the team for two years, said the team had a great season after taking a lesson from the defeat by Emerald at the preliminary final last season.
“It’s been a lot of fun, we knew what we had to try and achieve after a little bit of heartache last year losing the preliminary final,” he said.
“We made sure we challenged each other and got better at the things we fell down in the last season and just changed a few things around, structured up slightly differently.
“Obviously, we got the result that we were chasing and winning the flag.”
Healesville Seniors were defeated three times during this season.
From the failure of the last season and the losses during the season, the team could find out what to improve to achieve their goal of winning the flag.
Webster said the team had to deal with the crises wisely to bounce back.
“The focus for this year was keeping it simple because that’s what we do in games of football, being able to do simple things more often than what the opposition does,” he said.
“We made sure that we improved on our structures and processes that we embedded into the system last season.
“We had our backs against the wall amongst a few things that popped up over the year and had three losses throughout the year.
“They taught us a lot about where we’re at and what we needed to improve on to make sure we tightened up on the areas that we were lacking in those three games that we lost.”
The Bloods won Warburton-Millgrove, Seville and Warburton-Millgrove again in finals to stand on top.
The final score of the grand final between Healesville Seniors and Warburton-Millgrove Senors was 9.9 63 vs 1.5 11.
Webster said his team was strong in the last quarter throughout the season.
“Our first in the finals was against Warburton where they challenged us all the way, and we were able to stick to our processes and follow our game style, and then we were able to get across them and over the top of them in the last quarter by five points,” the coach said.
“The second game was against Seville, a similar position, hotly contested game, and very good opposition. Seville has beaten us twice throughout the year and in the end, we were able to make a couple of positional changes that enabled us again to have a really strong last quarter in order to win that game.
“The grand final was again a very close game, up until three quarter time, both teams had their opportunities, we controlled the ball a little bit better than what they did at times, which was able to give us the leads that we had at quarter time, half time and three quarter time, and then we made sure that our last quarter in the last game of the year was one of the best ones.”
Even Healesville Reserves made it to the grand final, although it didn’t end as what the whole Bloods had expected.
The Reserves tasted the bitter feeling when they had to see their grand final opponent Belgrave lift the trophy.
The final score of the Healesville Reserves’ grand final against Belgrave was 3.5 23 vs 5.11 41.
The coach said the success of both teams was all thanks to club effort and support from the Healesville community.
“We have a very strong player driven program, and we get really good buy in from all the players,” Webster said.
“We obviously had some new recruits that came to the club this year who brought into what we were trying to achieve and what we were all about as a football club and the culture we were trying to hire at the football club.
“Support that the club got from our community in Healesville is amazing. It’s obviously a small little town and the whole community gets behind the football club, and it’s great we can achieve some success for Healesville.”
