Under-18s Match Report

South Adelaide vs Norwood
Preliminary Final - Adelaide Oval - 10/09/18

Goals: Sladojevic, Colwell 3, Sparrow 2, Bogle, Beeche, Dumesny, Wade
Best: Bogle, Sparrow, Sladojevic, Juckers, Beeche, Manuel

Our Under-18s are through to the Grand Final after knocking off Norwood by five points in their Preliminary Final clash on Sunday morning. 

Heading into the Preliminary Final, Norwood were coming off a confidence building win over North Adelaide, while we had a close loss to the Eagles.

It was important that we got the boys feeling good about where were sitting. It was decided that the game be moved to Adelaide Oval, which was a great experience for the players.

We also got to use the Crows change rooms which had staff excited as well.

We started the game well kicking 5.4 point to Norwood's solitary point. The players had followed instruction to the letter and we seemed to be the side that settled first.

Norwood started to get some run back in the second quarter. We were lucky they didn't kick straight. Fortunately for us they only managed to kick 2.5 from their seven shots on goal, while we were accurate with our forward entries, kicking four goals straight.

When Job Colwell kicked his second for the quarter we stretched our lead out to 48 points.

However, after finding ourselves 40 points up at halftime we came out with a different attitude in the third term and took our foot off the pedal.

Norwood are a good side and were always going to come back at us. We didn't take that well and dropped our heads.

Norwood kicked a couple early and we missed some opportunities to stem their momentum and they continued to press. By the end of the third quarter the margin was back to seven points and we had a fight on our hands.

The last quarter pretty much went goal for goal.

Norwood twice cut our lead to one point, but we were able to answer with a goal of our own each time. When Tom Sparrow kicked his second midway through the quarter we pushed our buffer to 12 points.

The Redlegs did pull another one back, which set up a stressful end to the game. The last three minutes felt like they took forever with a five point lead and the opposition with the ball inside their forward 50.

However, we showed some great composure at times late in the game to control the tempo. The players showed some great character to fight for the win.

It was a great experience and I'm sure the players will get a lot of confidence knowing they can win finals and have now played at Adelaide Oval ahead of next week's Grand Final

We now get our rematch with the Eagles as the top two teams 

play the Eagles in next week's grand Final, we match up well and we are confident we can get a good result.

Mark Clayton
U18s Coach

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