Coachy's Corner: Round 1, 2008 Hi everyone, Welcome to Season 2008. Rec Footy returned last week to a new home and a new evening. While Sandringham gets re-turfed, the competition has started up in Box Hill, and this year on a Wednesday night. We are looking forward to the six week comp and seeing how we shape up against teams we haven't played before. After a tough 2007, we hope everyone involved enjoys this season. The Bullets welcome on board for '08 Simon Conti, who played a match for us in 2006 and the return to the club of Margit Tully and Danijela Mijic, who we'll be seeing in the next couple of weeks. David Gutteridge is another who debuted in Round 1 and we look forward to all their involvement. Players who can't be with the club this year are Ruth Hannan, who would have found it difficult to get to Box Hill most weeks and Dave Beattie, who has for now retired due to a foot injury. Our club thanks these players for their fantastic contribution last year. In some bad news, Dean Jones cracked a bone in his finger in last week's practice match and will miss the season. He's not going very far though, he'll be watching games from the sidelines with No. 1 Ticket Holder Dan Vitale. We wish Dean a speedy recovery and I'm sure we'll be hearing from him during the season. Round One We were playing Crankiest Cobras at 6:30pm with two players from other teams filling in for us, John for the whole game and Claire in the second half. It got under way with both teams getting quick touches into their forward half. Luke, Rob.H and Narelle started to find Dave Gutteridge in the forward half, while John was picking up possessions too. The backline was under a bit of pressure due to us missing our female defender, but Rob took a couple of good marks in the half of footy. Both teams were making errors, mainly kicking, which kept the ball turning over. At half time, we had 7 points to 25. Dave was our goalkicker, marking while running back with the flight of the ball. We kept players in their same positions for the second half, and things started to work. Crankiest Cobras' midfield were getting the ball out of the centre, but tuning it over, which allowed Simon and Rob to clear the footy out of defence. Luke, who was giving away height, started to take a few marks and Dave and John were providing targets in the forward zone. Before we knew it, Dave had another goal on the board and then I slotted one and we were starting to get on a bit of a roll. Rob was starting to take mark after mark, while Simon was getting more of the ball himself. Mistakes were still being made by both sides, which probably contributed to the low scoring, also with Crankiest Cobras missing a couple of goals no doubt kept us in it. Our replacement John kicked our last goal which brought us virtually level and a big final five minutes awaited. But Crankiest Cobras scored the final goal to win by six points, 32-26. Rob was great in defence in the second half taking some big marks, both he and Simon setting up most of our scoring opportunities. Luke worked his way back into the game, while Narelle had to try and contend with a fast running male midfielder, which hopefully she won't have to do again. It was a narrow loss, but a good game just the same, played in good spirit which is the main thing in Rec Footy. Best Players: Rob.H, Dave, Simon, Luke, Narelle