Thomas Ingleton
Altona claimed the Hockey Victoria men’s premier league minor premiership for the first since 1994.
The Seagulls secured 17 wins during the regular season to earn themselves a well deserved week’s rest before kicking off their finals campaign this weekend.
Coach Greg Drake said the team is pretty happy with where they currently sit heading into the finals.
“We are feeling pretty good, it’s fair to say that we’ve probably exceeded even our own expectations a little bit,” he said.
“This is the first time our club has finished on top of the ladder since 1994, it wasn’t necessarily a goal to finish on top but we’ve obviously been playing pretty well.”
Drake said Altona’s success has been helped through outstanding performances from players such as Liam Kerr-Nelson and Cooper Burns, both scoring 12 goals for the season.
“Cooper Burns missed a lot of the start of the season because he is based in Perth in the national development squad, so he’s come back sort of second half of the season and has clearly been a really important factor in our good form,” he said.
“We are actually really strong across the board, we’ve had something like 18 goal scorers for the year. That’s really more of a strength of ours that we have so many goal scorers rather than relying on one or two.”
Altona will Southern United in the semi finals this week.
Southern beat Doncaster 4-2 in an elimination final on Sunday.
Speaking before the match, Drake said he would be keeping a close eye during the game to prepare and analyse.
“We dropped a game to Southern United during the year, we beat them once and they beat us once.
“All the teams we have dropped points against, it’s pretty obvious they are all threats and we’re not better than any of them.
“We just have to play better than them on that particular day.”
Drake believes the key to going all the way this year will rely on their structure when the team doesn’t have possession, despite their attacking game being so prominent throughout the season.
“That defensive structure will be our emphasis and the idea being that if you’ve got a really good strong defensive structure, then you win the ball back often enough,” he said.
“It’s my philosophy that finals are won by teams with really strong defences.”
Thomas Ingleton
