In the fourth of a series of reviews, The Examiner looks over the season that was for Tom Garwood's Blues.

Season in a nutshell: Riverside's rollercoaster season began promisingly, plummeted in the middle and finished on a high.

After making their first A-grade final in 14 years, the Blues came within 22 runs of ending their 40-year flag drought.

Team highlight: Having scraped into finals, the Blues made the most of their opportunity.

Few would have tipped Riverside to win their semi-final at Westbury, but a stellar team effort - which was matched in the grand final - resulted in a 64-run victory.

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Team lowlight: The Blues qualified for a home final in the Greater Northern Cup but were obliterated inside 12 overs by Westbury after being bowled out for just 75.

Another 10-wicket defeat came at the hands of the Shamrocks later in the season when the Blues were dismissed for 113 and 68.

Individual performance: Riverside needed a big win in its final two-day outing against Mowbray and paceman Jesse Homan stood up to be counted.

The 21-year-old took the first two five-fors of his career to finish with 11-113, including the opening five scalps of Mowbray's second innings.

Ramesh Sundra's defiant 67 in the grand final is also worthy of mention as a breathtaking display of grit and determination.

What worked: Riverside's veteran all-rounders led from the front in the batting stakes with Tom Garwood (632 runs at 42.13), Sundra (428 at 30.57) and Patty Mackrell (373 at 31.08) all registering multiple 50s throughout the season.

The load was also shared across the bowling attack with Homan, Sam Lockett, Lyndon Stubbs, Garwood and Sundra collecting between 15 and 30 wickets each.

What didn't work: The Blues again struggled to make the switch from one-day cricket to two-day cricket, dropping their first three games after Christmas.

Best recruit: Aside from getting some games into Bailey Hunt early in the season, the Blues had a virtually identical team to last campaign.

Cooper Anthes spent most of the year with the Greater Northern Raiders but was crucial when available, making 37 in the semi-final along with a 50 and 2-16 in the grand final.

Surprise packet: Aidan O'Connor played his first A-grade season as a 14-year-old and showed plenty of promise, averaging 21.78 with the bat and taking 10 wickets.

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Best and fairest: Skipper Tom Garwood took out Riverside's top award last month after another stellar season with bat and ball.

As well as compiling six 50s and a ton to finish fourth in the Cricket North batting charts, the ever-reliable 28-year-old took 18 wickets across the season.

His 84 in the Cricket North grand final gave Riverside the ideal foundation to chase down Launceston's 284.

Captain says: We look back at it as quite a challenging year for us - we did put a lot of hard work into it so it was good to get some reward.

We obviously haven't played finals for quite a number of years and even to make the grand final was really impressive.

[Playing our best cricket at the season's end] was what we aim to do and it was really good - we had Cooper and James [Simpson] back as well, so we had a strengthened team and we knew that if we played our cricket we would challenge most sides.

Probably the best thing was going out to Westbury and beating Westbury out there which we haven't done for a long time.

The big standout was Jesse Homan - all the hard work he did pre-season .... it didn't go right for him before Christmas and then after Christmas he hit his straps and took 11 wickets in a game and set us up to get there [finals].

The club's very happy with the second grade making the semi-final, third grade just missed out and we had a very young second third-grade team.

The club's building in the way that we want it to and next year we'll get bigger and stronger - it's going in all the right directions.

I don't believe we'll be losing anyone so we can build on what we had last year.