Despite losing its last home-and-away match to Old Carey by 29 points, Old Trinity managed to retain fourth spot and will play St Bernards in the B Section 1st semi-final next Sunday at 2.00pm at Box Hill City Oval.
As a matter of interest, Old Trinity last played there in 1992, winning the B Section preliminary final against Old Melburnians and promotion to A Section.
Last Saturday, Old Trinity trailed at every change and Old Carey looked anything but a bottom four side. But the faintest whiff of relegation often plays out in funny ways and that’s one of the glorious things about amateur football even if it does mean hanging around for 15 or so minutes after the game, awaiting official confirmation of your fate. Old Trinity, at times, did its level best to keep the door ajar for University Backs (versus Old Melburnians) but thankfully their 8 point victory was nowhere near enough for them to walk through it.
Old Carey seemed much taller, quicker and more skilled than last time though that was three and a half months ago and the memory can play tricks but in any event it doesn’t matter much nor do the interminable “what ifs” or “maybes” at season’s end. The home-and-away season is now consigned to history as a new three week/four team contest looms.
For those of you too impoverished or too hungover to buy and/or read last Sunday’s broadsheet or tabloid, for the record, Old Trinity’s better players were Luke Paconi, Matt Jessop and Jack Osborn (yet again!), Andrew Bourke (see last week’s match report), Andrew Ramsden (still!!) and Tim Walsh.
And by the way, Rambo, 35 years young, has added yet another credit to his extraordinary amateur football CV by winning the competition’s goalkicking with 66 goals. Andy Cultrera, another icon of this club, finished third with 52 goals. (Pardon the emotion, and with due deference to all past and future, Old Trinity football life post Ramsden and Cultrera doesn’t bare thinking about).
Old Trinity has not played a senior final since the A Section preliminary final in 2004. But more importantly, in the first semi final against Marcellin, none of the form students gave us a snowflake’s chance in hell, and we absolutely blitzed them by 10 goals. Get the drift? (Trivia Question: Who, of the current list, played in that final?)
Anything and everything is possible in finals, so extrapolating home-and-away form-lines has no statistical merit whatsoever. Furthermore, Marcellin confounded the pundits last year in B Section. It scrambled fourth spot, was 23 points astern of Old Haileybury at the halfway mark of Q4 in the first semi-final and ended up winning the premiership!
That wonderful Hawthorn FC mentor, Alan Jeans, used to extol his troops at this time of the year to write their own history rather than let others interpret what might have been.
And as far as Old Trinity is concerned in 2009, so say all of us!
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