Brigades planning to play their brand of footy against a well-rested Railways side

Coming off a league-wide bye, the season is quickly reaching the halfway mark and the top four teams will be tested when they face each other this week. In a seven-team league there will always be one missing out, but Railways have easily had the worst luck with fixturing, having both of their byes in the first five rounds, followed by the long weekend bye. This week will be the first time that Railways will be able to gauge their team’s strength as they face off against the red hot Brigades. “The fixture has not been kind we’ve basically trained for four and a half months to play three games of footy,” coach John Reynolds said. “It makes it really hard to prepare for and now going into the second half of the season with no byes we’ll have to manage the workload to make sure our guys are right for finals should we get there.” The Blues are the only remaining undefeated team at 3-0, but the Hawks are sitting pretty at 3-1 with big wins under their belt. Brigades’ one loss came off the back of a two-point nail-biter against Northampton in round two, since then they have been on a war path, thrashing Towns by 138 points and thumping Mullewa by 170 points. Hawks coach Cory Foot said this week’s game would be a good one to watch. “We always know that anytime we come up against Railways, it’s going to be a really great contest,” he said. “We know they’re going to bring everything to the table and we’re just going to make sure we can match it, if not do one better.” Most teams would be happy with a 170-point win, but Foot said they needed a four-quarter effort of looking after the ball against Railways. “The Mullewa game, I felt we didn’t play our brand of football in the second quarter. . . if we’re going to play like that, we’re going to be finding ourselves chasing tail,” he said. “In the second half we did and I was really pleased with the way we went about our game style. . . we do take confidence in the way we went about that second half.” Going up against a Blues side with a lot of weapons, the Hawks can’t concentrate their efforts into stopping key players alone. “Dion (Anthony) is a great player that’s in some hot form, Jordan Williamson is the same. . . If you focus on them, Railways are the sort of club that have depth and all of a sudden, those sort of players will expose you,” Foot said. “We’ll go in with a team effort and a team mentality to stop all of their players, not just focusing on one or two players.” In the other games around the league, Northampton, after suffering their first loss of the season, will look to get back on track as they travel to Mazzuchelli Oval for the Northern derby against fourth-placed Chapman Valley. While Rovers are on a roll — winning their last two in a row — and will be looking for a third win against Mullewa at home. Towns get another week off with their bye.