It’s been a long time between drinks for the Mudgee Wombats rugby club but this Saturday, Trent Robertson’s under-13s side has the chance to bring a trophy to the cabinet at Jubilee Oval.
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The Batties are set to take on Dubbo Blue for the fourth time this season on Saturday after losing 40-27 to them in the major semi finals just two weeks ago.
Prior to that, the two sides split a pair of regular season games and Robertson’s quietly confident his troops can square the ledger in the grand final.
“Dubbo’s a good side across the park but I think we’ve got the best backline in the competition,” Robertson said.
“It’s an attitude thing for us. Dubbo got out to a 22-nil lead in the major and we go back within five of them.
“They’ve got some big boys in the midfield.”
It took a preliminary final win over Cowra/Canowindra for the Batties to advance to the grand final, but Robertson thinks his boys can improve a lot on the 26-10 triumph.
“They won but they won fairly ugly, to be honest… it wasn’t their best performance but they did enough to win,” Robertson said.
“They’ve got a lot more in them. We went down to their level. It’s not a slight on them but for what we can do and how we can play, we should have done better.”
Last season, the Mudgee Wombats fielded an under-12s side in the under-13s competition which was very difficult for them at the time but Robertson thinks it’s led to some serious improvement this season.
“They got whacked by some of the bigger blokes last year but it was great character building for them,” he said.
It’s all come together in 2018 though and this under-13s side is made up of products from all across the Mid-Western region.
‘We’ve got kids from Dunedoo and Rylstone so to bring them all together is fantastic.”
The whole roster will head to Forbes at 3.30pm on Friday afternoon for a camp... ‘Origin style’.
“We’ll carb load them on the Friday night and we’ve got breakfast booked in the morning,” he laughed.
Kick-off is from Forbes at 9.30am on Saturday.