Early wins like last Saturday's against Lockington-Bamawm United are a bonus for Mount Pleasant coach Derrick Filo as the Blues learn to play with a new-look side.
IN CHARGE: Mount Pleasant coach Derrick Filo has the new-look Blues 1-1 after two round
EARLY wins like last Saturday's against Lockington-Bamawm United are a bonus for Mount Pleasant coach Derrick Filo as the Blues learn to play with a new-look side.
The Blues are 1-1 after two rounds of the Heathcote District Football League season and last Saturday defeated the Cats for the first time since 2007, ending a string of 16 losses in a row against the four-time defending premiers.
Last Saturday's winning Mount Pleasant side featured 11 new recruits.
"With so many new players, we expect we'll have a fairly good second half of the year, but it's really important that we pick up early wins along the way to put us in a good position to make a charge at it later on," Filo said on Wednesday.
"There's a lot of areas for us to get better in, but a win early on... we'll certainly take that."
Among the 11 recruits last Saturday were six who have come from Parkside in the Western Region Football League - Chris Muratore, Drew Vincent, Ethan Langwell, Jason Shaw, Michael Licciardo and Nicholas Grigg.
New centre half-forward Grigg has kicked 10 goals in his first two games, taking over the role from last year's best and fairest Kain Robins, who is now playing for the Southern Mallee Giants, born out of a merger between Beulah and Hopetoun in the Mallee Football League.
"We all know how good a player Kain is, but so far, Griggy has been a very good replacement," Filo said.
On-baller Muratore has figured high among the Blues' best players in both games so far, as has another of the recruits, the highly-rated Simon Seddon.
"Seddon has been really good. He's a midfielder who can go forward and is just all class," Filo said.
And veteran Shannon Milward - also a Mount Pleasant recruit - showed he still has plenty of tricks up his sleeve last Saturday with a haul of eight goals.
With last week's 27-point win over Lockington-Bamawm United behind them, the Blues now face what's touted as two of the top teams over the next fortnight in rivals Colbinabbin this Saturday night followed by Huntly.
"We're just taking it one week at a time, but I'm quietly confident that if we can play some good footy we can go alright over these next couple of weeks," Filo said.
This Saturday night's game between the Blues and Grasshoppers at Colbinabbin will start at 6.15pm.
Meanwhile, on Sunday, White Hills will be striving to win its first game of the season against an Elmore side that last weekend snapped an 18-game losing streak when it defeated Heathcote by 59 points.
A glaring deficiency for the Demons in their back-to-back losses to Colbinabbin and Huntly has been their poor conversion in front of goal.
The Demons have kicked a combined 10.26 - 3.10 against Colbinabbin and 7.16 against Huntly.
"It's obviously really frustrating... we're just missing easy chances," White Hills coach Shaun Makepeace said.
The Demons' woes in front of goal in the first two rounds was best summed up last Saturday when Jason Curtain was gifted the ball 10m out after a miscued Huntly kick-in from full-back, only to snap a behind.
"We played a really good first quarter against Colbinabbin in the first game. We went inside 50 10 times to five but put one point on the scoreboard to their 3.2," Makepeace said.
"Last week against Huntly we both had eight scoring shots in the first quarter. They kicked 3.5 to our 1.7 and we're a couple of goals down instead of the game being on an even keel as it should have been."
Among the culprits for the Demons has been new forward Kris Lea, who has had nine scoring shots in the first two rounds for a return of 2.7.
"There's no excuses... we're just missing them at the moment and it's not good enough," Makepeace said.
"We've been doing a lot of work at training to address it and hopefully, we'll start to see things turnaround this weekend against Elmore."
• Latest Sportsbet HDFL premiership market:
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