IT is rare that you get to round three and hear a coach talking about the importance of a win, but this is no run-of-the-mill Essendon District Football League division 1 season.
Every little victory on the road to the dreaded July 14 will go some way to shaping the futures of each of the 14 clubs in the league’s second tier, with a split of the ranks occurring after the 13th round and the formation of a new third tier.
Eight teams will remain in division 1, the other six go with their tail between their legs to form a new division 2 competition.
For Hillside coach Alan Ezard, Saturday’s gutsy 14-point win over the Hadfield Hawks at Hillside Reserve was akin to an “eight-point game”, due to the likely close proximity on the ladder between the two sides.
“It was a very important win for the club,” he said.
“One of those games we had to win because we’re going to be fighting against sides like Hadfield and those sorts of sides around the top eight.”
The Sharks have made an encouraging start to life under Ezard. They are 2-1 after three rounds and sit in sixth position.
After the positive start, talk around the Shark Tank has not exclusively been about survival, but greener pastures.
“We want to improve as a club,” Ezard said. “Our goal is to play finals and if we’re playing finals it [survival] will look after itself.”
The Sharks came out snapping with a real vigour against the Hawks.
They piled on six goals to one in the opening quarter with the breeze to get the upper hand.
The game see-sawed quarter on quarter due to the wind favouring one end, but the Sharks’ work in the early part of the game was telling and they were never headed.
The blood pressure was up for Sharks fans in the last quarter.
The game-sealing goal came from opportunist Evan Bassingthwaighte with eight minutes to go.
“We pinched a goal against the breeze, which was really important because we were 15 points up at the time and that got us out to 21 with about eight minutes to go and it gave us that real lift we needed to dig deep and hang on.”
The Sharks face a tough test when they travel to West Coburg on Saturday.
Premier division: Greenvale 23.15 (153) d Keilor 9.7 (61).
Division 1: Hillside 11.14 (80) d Hadfield 9.12 (66), Keilor Park 23.28 (166) d Jacana 5.4 (34), Tullamarine 19.12 (126) d Taylors Lakes 11.7 (73).
