LAUNCESTON’S round 4 win over Lauderdale down South was a defining result for both clubs.
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It made the football public stand up and take notice of the emerging Blues and it sparked a five-match winning streak from the fifth-placed Southern Bombers that ended last week against Clarence.
Launceston are one win ahead in third and coach Sam Lonergan is tipping the two contested-ball specialists to be hard at it again at Windsor Park on Saturday.
“I imagine they want to travel up here and do what we did to them down there, so I’m expecting a pretty tough and fiery side,” Lonergan said.
“A couple of weeks back they had a good win against North Launceston in the North, which shows travelling doesn’t really affect them too much.
“They are a competitive side with a massive focus on one-on-one footy and beating their direct opponent with some AFL talent and young kids that put their hands up for state footy.”
The Blues went down by 21 points to the Northern Bombers on Friday night, but Lonergan was impressed with his team’s performance and knows there are key areas of their game that can improve.
“It think we are good at contested footy as well, It has been a massive strength for us from a clearance point of view, and whichever is better at that on the day will have a fair shot at winning the game,” Lonergan said.
“I’d like to improve our rebounding from defensive 50, we can be a little bit cleaner in getting the ball deeper into goal.” Launceston have dropped Nathan O’Donoghue and Ben Killalea in favour of Casey Brown and Connor Smith, while the Bombers have swapped Liam Meagher and Mitchell Anderton for Corey Laoumtzis and Thor Boscott.
Lauderdale coach Darren Winter said his side could not afford to concede six opening-term goals for two consecutive weeks. Winter said he is prepared to start shaking up his line-up.
“[This is a] massive game, which we need to win and will keep us in touch with the top three or maybe play finals footy and have a good second half of the year,” he said.
“It’s going to be a tough game going up there… we just need to be using the ball much better.
“I think our team has been really predictable, we haven’t changed our team probably for nine weeks in the sense of positional changes… and that probably made it a bit easy for guys to match up on us.
“So we’ll start throwing the team around a bit more now.”
The match starts at 1pm.
In other matches, Clarence hosts Devonport, Hobart City travel to Burnie and Tigers tackle reigning premier Glenorchy at Twin Ovals.
NORTH LAUNCESTON has the bye.