While there’s a strong chance Greg Horton’s Mudgee Wombats will play finals footy in this year’s New Holland Agriculture Cup competition, nothing is locked in yet.
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However, a win on Saturday against Blayney will pencil the first grade side into the post-season and stop a three-game slide that’s seen the Wombats relinquish third place to CSU Bathurst.
The Wombats’ women’s team is also under pressure this weekend as they need a win to keep their finals hopes alive.
The girls play Temora at Cowra on Saturday and will look to narrow the five-point gap between fourth-placed Emus and themselves.
Second grade is most comfortably placed as they hold down third position and sit a massive 24 competition points behind Parkes who is running fifth.
“We want to get a roll going into the finals and hopefully get a couple more wins,” second grade forward Jamie Bayliss said.
“We were unfortunate last week to just lose to Parkes but we’ve spoken about what we were doing wrong and hopefully we can correct it and come away with the win.”
Bayliss highlighted his outfit’s defence as the biggest cause for concern.
“We weren’t sliding in, we weren’t covering properly,” he said.
“We were too slow at the rucks and kept turning over ball. We talked about that after the game.
“We’ve figured out in the last few weeks where we’ve been making our mistakes and now we’re starting to get on top of them and hopefully we can make a run into the finals.”
Although the second grade side is running third, it almost downed competition leaders Narromine as they lost on the buzzer less than a month ago.
While the Wombats didn’t win, Bayliss and his team drew confidence from the nature of that game and knew a second tier championship was well within their grasp.
“It was an unlucky loss for us against them. We weren’t too sure how that game was going to end up and we lost by two points on the buzzer after leading most of the game. It’s a massive boost for us so when we play them in the grand final, hopefully, we know where to hit them and how to play them.”
First grade’s Dave Birch acknowledges his team’s slide in recent weeks but remains confident his men will not only make the finals, but shake things up once they get there.
“We won that second half against CSU. We can play footy but we’ve been struggling to play for 80 minutes,” he said.
“Parkes was a cracking game and we were missing six first graders. I think things are still looking really good for us.”
First grade kicks off at 3.15pm.