Gazette picks super side

By Jarrod Potter
THE lads at the Pakenham Gazette offered up a curious fantasy football question last week: “Can you make a good Supercoach team with players only from the local area?”
Our answer…we tried.
From only our distribution areas (with a couple of exceptions due to a lack of options) we’ve put together a side decent enough to compete in the bottom eight of any Supercoach league.
We’re wholly reliant on the midfield scoring massively. The Gazette territory is fertile ground for midfielders with Matt Boyd, Dale Thomas and Kade Simpson set to provide powerful 100s while Tom Scully, Ryan Bastinac and Steven Salopek also have it in them.
We were stretched in the rucks and had to extend the boundaries slightly towards Gippsland to fill out a full thirty, but the ruck combo of Mumford/West should reel in some decent points for Team Gazette.
The midfield is gutsy, with six premium players and even a decent bench line dominating. The backline starts strong with Chris Newman and Rob Murphy but we’ve picked key position players who go the punch rather than pick up the junk kicks and handballs in Alex Silvagni and Michael Firrito, so the question will remain if they can increase their stats just for our benefit.
Ten tons of quality rookies fill this side with Tomas Bugg, Matt Buntine, James Magner, Tory Dickson and others giving us value, but there’s not a whole lot left to upgrade to since we almost ran out of players in the first place.
Robbie Gray is an iffy pick we’ll admit, but he did live in Dandenong and with us stretched for options, it was fair enough.
Ash Smith (West Coast) and Shane Savage (Hawthorn) are two omissions we didn’t want to make but we were pressed for cash. They will be added to the side in time as our rookies pick up value.
How do we think the side can go? Top 30,000 isn’t an unreasonable mark to set. We’ll place it in and keep you posted on how it fares.
If we’ve missed anyone please contact the Pakenham Gazette team at sport@starnewsgroup.com.au