West Division 1 men came up against Strikers/Naracoorte in the Lower South East Hockey Association preliminary final on Saturday.
Strikers came into the game with a full team for the first time all season.
Led by Jordan Millhouse, Dean McCarthy, and Connor Millhouse, they were eager to upset West and advance to the grand final.
The first 10 minutes featured attacks from both sides, with the defence of West and Strikers being too solid.
Late in the first, West had a breakthrough in Brayden Burston finding space a metre off the baseline to put his side up 1-nil.
The next five minutes was all West, having numerous shots at goal, one of which being a stroke going bottom right that was saved by Strikers’ goalie David Coombe.
West eventually penetrated in a short corner, again through Burston.
The second quarter saw the game beginning to settle, West being 2-nil up started to ease the pressure.
After a disallowed goal from Nathan Taylor, the sides went into half time with West still up 2-nil.
Flicker Gavin Robertson started the third quarter off well by scoring one to the bottom left.
A near five minutes later, Taylor put a tap in to get West four in front.
The third quarter remained in favour of West, with Burston eventually making a run to finish off his hattrick.
The final quarter saw West score another goal, and then easing off the pressure.
Strikers took full advantage of this, scoring three goals near the tail end of the game.
Despite their best efforts, West were the victors 6-3 and look forward to taking on Tigers next weekend in the grand final.
After the high drama of both of the semi finals in the division women, the clash between West and Naracoorte for a grand finals berth was the most highly anticipated match of the weekend.
The first half was all Naracoorte, with West coming out of the blocks uncharacteristically slowly.
Naracoorte scored first and had multiple other chances but could only take a 1-0 advantage into the half time break.
West came out of the half time break the better of the two sides, with a new intensity that saw them score almost immediately when Ange Broad snuck one past the Naracoorte goalie in a scrappy piece of play.
Broad made it two only minutes later to give West the lead and it looked for all money like West was about to break the game open.
Naracoorte however kept it together and evened the scores with five minutes to go in the third, and then regained the lead a mere two minutes later with a beautiful piece of team play to eliminate the West goalie and slot a simple goal home to take a 3-2 lead into the last break.
There was more drama to come however.
With eight minutes to go Naracoorte gave themselves some breathing room with a fourth goal, but a short corner conversion by West brought it back to 4-3 with five minutes remaining.
West stepped the intensity up even further and put a huge amount of pressure on the Naracoorte defence, dragging their goalie and adding an attacker to do everything possible to force the equaliser.
Despite multiple short corners after the siren to test the nerves Naracoorte held on and will now take on Tigers in the grand final.
