Grand finals have a habit of creating dreams or nightmares for football coaches.
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But Dave Pieper was surprised to be facing one before last year’s Farrer League premiership decider.
“Mark Driscoll – he’s been my right-hand man out there ever since I’ve coached – he had a dream the night before that Andy Carey got injured and I thought, ‘What will we do if he gets injured?’” Pieper recalls.
It was a good question, but one he’d rather not have faced for real hours later.
“He went down. But he stayed out there. That was an amazing effort what he did.”
That, of course, is the stuff of legend now at The Rock-Yerong Creek – Carey kicking four goals on a broken leg.
Just like defender Aiden Ridley’s monster goal to level the scores in the final quarter and Dale Hugo’s matchwinner after Carey finally succumbed late in the game.
“He’s a very reliable kick, Dale, in front of goals and he loves a goal. So he was very happy when Undies (Andy Carey) come off in the last quarter and he could go down to full-forward,” Pieper says.
That was the end. The beginning was a nightmare. Carey’s injury compounded a scoreless first quarter for the Magpies in which nothing seemed to be working. Pieper says he wasn’t panicking about a 28-point deficit but he was looking for quarter time.
“It was good coming in. I had Aaron de Jong and Matt ‘Jiffy’ Carroll also helping my bench, which is Mark Driscoll and Dougie Bruckner, and they've obviously played a lot of footy. They were really good, pointed out a few things, and they were very positive at quarter time.”
But returning to Robertson Oval this week, Pieper says it’s the understanding of what it meant beyond the boundary that still stops him in his tracks five months on.
“Everyone you run into that you haven’t seen they say, ‘I was there that day’ and they couldn’t believe what happened in the end, just the way East Wagga started and how slow we were.”
Now a former coach (who will play on under co-coaches Carey and Andrew Clarke), Pieper is finally a premiership-winning one.
“Very satisfying from my point of view. But more importantly from the club's point of view, it was unbelievable,” Pieper says.
“When you walk into the club out there after the grand final and you see all the locals and everyone that’s put in their own time throughout the year – just the smiles on their faces, they’re just so happy and satisfied with how the boys went.”
“It’s as much theirs as it is ours and just the satisfaction on their faces, it was really pleasing. Every player was introduced to walk into the club and the cheer and the roar of everyone… It was really good.”
The stuff of dreams, really.