Reds cap off perfect season

The win is the icing on the perfect season cake for the first-grade side. Not once did they lose a game all season.

“It’s a relief more then anything,” coach Darren Solomons told the Post after the win.

“You go through the year and dominate a comp, then in the wet in pretty ordinary conditions, to put on that many points against a pretty strong opposition is great.”

Goulburn showed why they were ACT-Monaro’s best team. Despite pouring rain they dominated play, charging up the middle and seemed undeterred to throw the ball around in the greasy conditions.

It was the Goulburn side teams had come to fear this season.

“I couldn’t be prouder,” co-captain Jordan Wilcox said after the win.

“It was probably the best game we’ve played. So to finish with that sort of game is really, really sweet. It’s a good feeling.”

Fellow co-captain and veteran Boyd Newby knew anything could have happened on grand-final day.

He knows all too well what it means to perform on the day, after he had led his side to last year’s shock grand-final loss. For him, the win was about redemption.

“It was good to actually perform on grand final day,” he laughed. 

“We owned up. Cooma always come with a lot of confidence, so it was good to turn it back around and put our strengths on them.”

For Cooma, it was a chance gone begging. Red Devils coach Sean Neilson said the side took heart from the Hall Bushrangers gutsy and unexpected one point win over the Dirty Reds reserves earlier in the day.

But he admits, in the end Goulburn were too good.

“We didn’t expect to go down by that margin,” he said.

“We weren’t good enough in the line-outs. We turned up a bit of the ball and defensively we were falling off tackles on the bigger Goulburn fellas and in the end it hurt us.”

“I’ve battled for that cup quite a few times over my footballing days. I think about seven times I’ve had a crack and I’ve come away with it three times. It’s not easy to do.”

The Goulburn reserves had gone into the day’s earlier ACT-Monaro reserve-grade grand-final like their first-grade counterparts - with a point to prove.

They too had been undefeated all season.

But as sports go, sometimes you can’t have it all.

The Hall Bushrangers were the hungrier of the two sides and eventuated 13-12 victors.

But he game was nothing less then expected between the two clubs. The season’s previous encounters between the two sides had come down to the wire.

“We had plenty of opportunity,” Goulburn reserve-grade player/coach Cole Davis said after the match.

“It was the small things, we just didn’t do the little things right. But at the end of the day they were just too good.”

For first-grade the reserve loss wasn’t ideal preparation but as coach Solomons said, it needed to be forgotten come game time.

“It’s just a matter of telling them to block out what has just happened and focus on the job at hand. To their credit they never dwelt on it.”