Wonthaggi Power tastes success on Gippsland Grand Final day
A HUGE crowd in black, white and teal turned out at the Morwell netball courts on Saturday, September 20 and they got what they came for first-up when the club’s C Grade team came through a gruelling finals campaign to claim the premiership...
A HUGE crowd in black, white and teal turned out at the Morwell netball courts on Saturday, September 20 and they got what they came for first-up when the club’s C Grade team came through a gruelling finals campaign to claim the premiership.
Morwell finished top and deserved their place in the grand final after beating Power in the semi-final 45-32 a few weeks earlier. Wonthaggi had earlier beaten second-top team Leongatha 31-24 in the first round of finals, but then had to come up against Leongatha again at Sale in the preliminary final, which turned out to be one of the games of the whole final series.
At three-quarter time in that game, Leongatha led 23-21, but with two turnovers and a centre pass to start the last quarter, Brigette Tack hit three goals in a row as the team surged to the lead. With turnovers both ways and the wind playing havoc with scoring, Leongatha got the last score in ordinary time to make it 28-all.
Extra time was like another game. Wonthaggi with the first goal, Leongatha’s Kate McCarthy missing hers, but a turnover and it was all tied up once more.
It went like that right down to the wire with defenders on both sides heroic, but finally Wonthaggi went two ahead close to the end, Leongatha pulled one back and it finished as a 39-38 win to Wonthaggi.
They’d done the hard yards and clearly played themselves into grand final form by the time the match started on Saturday, September 20.
Both teams contesting the grand final, Wonthaggi and Morwell, started the game well with 11 and 10 goals respectively, but Power really turned it on in the second quarter to take a six-goal lead and they never looked back.
Quarters of 10-5 in the second and 11-7 in the third took away the heart-stopping conditions of the previous week and while Morwell closed the gap to five at one stage in the last quarter, Wonthaggi answered the challenge to take it back out to eight at the finish.
Bridgette Tack, who had a stellar finals campaign in goals, won the best-on-court medal and Power went on to a glorious 40-32 win, much to the delight of the surging Wonthaggi Power crowd.
