A THUMPING win by the Horsham Saints saw the side open its account for the season on Sunday.
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The side was too strong for Dimboola after a sluggish start to eventually run out 11.14 (80) to 2.6 (18) winners.
Saints coach Luke fisher said it was good that his side was able to get back to way it wanted to play.
“We played the game style that we wanted to play that we should have played on Tuesday,” he said.
“We want to run and carry because we don’t have talls.
“So we dipped the toe in the water today, experimented with a few things and changed the way we moved the footy. It worked for the most part but there is still some areas we want to look at.”
The Saints missed opportunities early in the game before the Roos got on the board with first goal of the match.
When the Saints did manage their first goal there was a quick reply as Dimboola looked like it was ready to put up a tough fight when it returned fire within a minute.
Only a Sam Clyne goal after the first quarter siren saw the home team steal the lead back.
From that point on the Saints did not look back as Dimboola failed to kick another goal.
Fisher said Dimboola were a competitive side but just lacked some of the depth of other teams.
“Dimboola came out hard after the round one loss,” he said.
“They really compete well physically.”
Dimboola coach Al McKinnon echoed Fisher’s comments and said it was difficult to play the game out without the cattle.
He said the lack of scoring came from his team not working hard both ways.
“We worked really well to get back and block their forward entries but we just didn’t get back,” he said.
“We got caught ball watching and we didn’t have those options when we went forward.
“We had enough play to get it into our forward line but we just didn’t have the options.”
The four-points quarter time lead increased to 27 at half time, was 44-points at three-quarter-time before the Saints eventually won by 62 points.
McKinnon said Darcy Dubois did a very good job restricting the influence of the dangerous Sam Jasper.
“That was his job for the day and he did well,” he said.
“Our back line in general did well under a lot of pressure because there was a lot of service, there was not many passengers in the back six.”
He also pointed to the hard work of Lachie Watts who was often outnumbered playing in the forward line.
For the Saints it was a big performance from Clyne who got a lot of the ball and kicked three goals.
“I don’t think there was too many standouts,” Fisher said.
“I asked for 21 contributors and I got 21 contributors. Clyne reaped the benefit of everyone structuring up really well.
“Our back six just didn’t let much through.”
Moving forward Fisher wants the Saints to become more efficient.
“There was probably only about 10 minutes in the third quarter that I was disappointed in,” he said.
“That was more about the effort, we just tried to front run a little bit and we weren’t working back hard enough.
“We still need to be a bit more clean and efficient going forward.”