The Cobar Roosters First Graders demolished the Narromine Jets 42-6 in the Christie & Hood Castlereagh Rugby League qualifying semi final at Tom Knight Memorial Oval on Saturday.
G’day sports fans, as I’ve done such a great job with the Reggies reports this season, the boss said I could tackle First Grade head on!
With the chances of a home grand final at stake, the Cobar Roosters were ready to play on Saturday and came out firing on all 13 cylinders.
In a pre-game interview, co-captain/coach Thomas Plater spoke highly of his boys and about how their attitude has picked up with the end now in sight.
Tom Knight Memorial Oval on Saturday was looking better than Fraser Talu’s perfectly groomed hairdo.
Sparks were destined to fly between the two big mobile teams, and that was evident from the initial kick off.
Roosters forwards Jed Noonan and Gerald Mackey were bashing heads like 1980’s props and were making metres easily.
Field possession started off quite even, until Talu gathered in a cross-field kick to race over and score Cobar’s first points.
Plater missed his first conversion attempt (and also the next two, but went on to finish the match with a tally of five goals).
Young Gun Reece Josephson crossed for Cobar’s next try when the ball was spread wide to the young winger who dived over to score.
Narromine then quickly rolled down the field with good structured play.
They attacked Cobar’s left hand side defence with a three on two overlap.
They however forgot to tell young Josephson of their game plan, as Josephson intercepted the ball and ran 99 metres to cross for his second try.
The Narromine Jets crowd suddenly went quiet.
The Jets defenders got sick of chasing the youngest on the left and thought they would swap sides only to see Talu steal the ball from the air and, on his 80 metre dash to the try line, is believed to have turned around and said, “I can do it too Reece!”
Cobar then had a couple of ball handling issues which helped the Jets with field possession, which in turn challenged the Cobar defence on the lefthand side again.
The Jets put through a misjudged kick which went straight into the breadbasket of Josephson. Again this kid took off like his father was after him for taking money from his sock draw and crossed for his third try of the match.
The Roosters started to build more confidence challenging the Jets and this set up a roll-on effect.
Cobar was reminded by their other co-captain/coach Loma Atuau to hold their heads and not look like a bantam roosters strutting around.
Nathan McAndrew, and Tim ‘slippery’ Hillam were holding up the middle for the tiring Roosters’ defence with solid cover defence and great talk on the field
Not long after McAndrew fought his way over the line to score and take Cobar’s lead out to 30-0 just before half time.
The Cobar boys then jogged off for a quick regroup and 25 pushups each.
The same Cobar team came out in the second half with plenty of confidence, and five minutes in, a big wave built up as the “Samoan tsunami” Atuau cut back in on the defence to score a try for his mammoth effort.
The game then started to tighten up a bit with an early release of Noonan due to groin strain and the big boppers in the middle were tiring.
After persistence on the line, the Jets scored a converted try midway through the second half.
With the Jets facing a humiliating defeat, tempers started to flare in the last quarter which resulted in one Jet being sent back to the hanger for a 10 minute break.
Then that kid on the wing decided he wanted to score again. After good lead up work by fullback Ashley Davies, he linked up with Josephson who raced away to score another flying try out on the wing.
On the last play of the game a senior Jets player threw out a wing into Cobar’s young dummy half, Tyler Coughlan’s nose, which resulted in the young fella laying flat for several minutes. (On a positive note, Coughlan is still pretty and one of Cobar’s best looking players, and was able to join the team later for after game celebrations.)
The final score was 42-6 in favour of the Cobar Roosters.—Dido
In a post-game interview, Atuau and Plater said they got away with “a few lucky tries”.
“We definitely got three or four lucky tries in that first half but you don’t get them without pushing around the ball and just being enthusiastic, which is something we said we wanted to do,” Plater said.
“The ball has got to bounce the right way but you’ve also got to be in the right place anyway.”
Both coaches said the biggest contributing factor to their win had been their defence.
“It’s something we’ve worked on all year round, trying to get numbers in tackles,” Atuau said.
“We will definitely take this sort of momentum into this weekend’s game, and make sure we bring that grand final home.”
The Roosters will travel to Coolah this Saturday to play the Roos with the winner to earn the honour of hosting the grand final.
