Queanbeyan Whites winger Lachlan Freeth. Photo: Lannon Harley,
QUEANBEYAN Whites winger Lachlan Freeth acknowledges the club was in desperate need of a confidence boost heading into its round 14 clash with Easts at Griffith Oval.
And thankfully for the finals aspirants, that was exactly what the Whites received after thrashing the hapless home side 70-10 in what was by far Queanbeyan’s most dominant performance of the season.
The Whites went into the match on the back of two successive losses, including the side’s lackluster 16-5 defeat at the hands of Uni-Norths the previous week.
Queanbeyan’s poor run of recent form meant the club was almost certainly staring down the barrel of a season-ending loss should they have fallen to a third-straight defeat against competition strugglers Easts.
“It was a good win and a real confidence booster,” Freeth said of Queanbeyan’s big win. “Coming off some losses where we’ve played poorly and where we haven’t taken our chances, it was something we really needed.
“Some of our combinations probably started to click and we started to put some of the things we’d been working on at training into practice as well so it wasn’t an overnight turnaround.
“[Easts] might not be the strongest opposition but we still needed to get the last pass away to score points against them which is something we weren’t able to do [against Uni-Norths].”
While necessary to keep the club’s finals hopes alive, Queanbeyan’s 60-point victory over the bottom-placed Easts is hardly an ideal barometer for the club heading into the business end of the season.
Queanbeyan’s next match by contrast will be against the ladder-leading Tuggeranong Vikings.
But Freeth denied last weekend’s rout would count for little when the Whites go up against the competition frontrunners.
“I think there are definitely still things we can take out of it,” he said. “Obviously against Tuggeranong it’s going to be a very different game and we’ll approach it differently.
“But worst case scenario, we’ll take a bit of confidence out of the fact that we’ve proved we can put points on the board if we get the opportunity. The difference is we’re not going to get as many chances against Tuggeranong [as against Easts] but the chances we do get, we’ll have the confidence to finish them off.”