Wednesday 4 August 2010
Aspley are continuing to evolve as a competitive football unit and pose a serious threat to the NT Thunder at Graham Road on Saturday.
The Hornets have a 3-4 record since Russell Evans took the reins after Round 8, recording an impressive win at Broadbeach last weekend.
Evans says the young side is a work in progress, but it content with the results to date.
“The pleasing thing all the way through is that we are building,” Evans said. “All the key performance indicators we are setting ourselves we are achieving.
“We’re starting to get to a point where we can match it with any side when we play our football the right way.”
Evans’ early plan was to shore up the defence, but the coaching staff have been able to move their attention further up the ground.
“For the first few weeks were worked out getting our defensive structures right, then we concentrated on getting more run through the middle of the ground,” he said. “We’ve got a much stronger work rate in there now, which is good.
“Now we’re looking at our forward line and to kick one of our best scores of the season against a side (Broadbeach) above us on the ladder was very good.”
Midfielders Matt Shir and Jamie Sheahan, defender Robert Copeland and utility Brent Evans have been the rocks on which the Hornets have been built around and will be key players against the Thunder.
“Brent has been very good, he has probably been undervalued by people (outside the club) a bit because he has been such a good player for so long,” his coach said.
Evans admitted Sheahan had been working overtime to deal with taggers who have bobbed up in recent times.
“He persisted very well (last weekend),” Evans said. “He certainly gets a lot of attention trying to shut him down – he has got a tag for each of the last four weeks and he’s slowly coming to terms with that.
“We’ve been talking about strategies he can use and he is handling it a bit better now.”
Evans added that Sam Carpenter had also been very important to the Hornets.
“He gets a lot of hard ball,” Evans said. “He’s been doing a lot of work on his kicking and he’s dropping it (to the boot) 100% better now. He used it really well last weekend.”
A win over the Thunder would give the Hornets the chance to jump up places on the premiership table over the last fortnight of the QAFL season.
