By Matt Fotia
Rodney Eade has experienced a lot during his football career, with four VFL premierships across 259 games with Hawthorn and the Brisbane Bears along with multiple finals appearances in his 377 game coaching career.
But footy is footy no matter where you are, according to the former Sydney, Western Bulldogs and Gold Coast taskmaster, as he prepares for his third year as Balwyn Senior Coach.
“I’m enjoying local football, no matter what level, whether its AFL, local footy or junior footy it’s all about the people around the club and ours is a good club with good people,” said Eade.
His first year at Cherry Road was a disappointing one on paper, with the Tigers missing the finals for the first time in its EFNL history.
2019 was more like it for Tiger fans however, with the club finishing the Home and Away season in second on the ladder, before losing the Preliminary final to familiar foe Blackburn.
“The first year started off really promisingly but we just got smashed with injuries, we could hardly field a seconds team come the end of the year, so even though everyone else will judge us by results I was really pleased with the players effort and their willingness to hang in there,”
“We didn’t really get belted, we just didn’t have the cattle.” said Eade.
“Last year was really pleasing you know, to finish second at the end of the home and away, win a final and get to where we got to – with a few holes in the team – was a really good effort and the players were terrific.”
Balwyn returned to the EFNL finals after a year in the wilderness. Photo – Field of View Sports Photography
The Tigers, who have won five top flight premierships in their EFNL history, have gone from hunted to hunter in the last few years as they, along with the rest of the competition, look to reel in Vermont.
Eade applauds his rivals for their club structure, especially their junior program which has a flow on effect through to the senior clubs success.
“They’ve (Vermont) got such a good junior program so their points are never an issue, teams like us are going to suffer with points when we go recruiting,”
“They had their best team in at one point last year and they still had 10 points to play with, there is no way known we could do that at the moment because we have no juniors, which makes it difficult because they could lose players from last year and be able to recruit no worries at all.”
But rather then spend time over the pre-season worrying about how good the Eagles might be, Balwyn have focused purely on the goings on at Cherry Road.
“We’ve got to worry about what we control, there was some areas to improve and we think with recruiting we’ve fixed most of those and then you just have to think about getting it right on the day,”
“You can’t worry too much about what other people are doing, it’s about controlling the controllables, worrying about what we can do and hopefully it’s good enough.”
The club are looking to solve the player points conundrum though, entering an Under 19 side again after being unable to in 2019.
Eade suggests that the high volume of private schools in the Inner East area hinders Balwyn’s ability to get consistency amongst the Unders.
“It’s difficult in our area due to the high number of private schools, because with all the good juniors if they’re not playing NAB League they’ll be playing school football, but we know that having Under 19’s is vital and we put in a heavy campaign over the pre-Christmas period and we’ve got a good group together,”
“There’s a few young lads that look promising and hopefully that can continue, but it’ll take some work because of our geography.”
Balwyn’s small club size has come in handy recently though, with the close knit environment giving Eade the utmost confidence that all members of the club will come through the current coronavirus pandemic in good spirits.
“The strength of Balwyn is that we aren’t a big club, which means it is a very tight knit community, so I know that there will be people there for anybody if anything happens or if there is any anxiety and alike,”
“We’ll be there for each other.”