SOME feel it should come with an asterisk, but Trent Cohalan believes the abbreviated AFL Riverina Championship season has been the toughest to stay motivated in over his long career.
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The 32-year-old will play his 300th club game for Mangoplah-Cookardinia United-Eastlakes against Turvey Park at Maher Oval on Saturday.
Cohalan returns to the side for last week's 25-point win over Osborne after missing the opening round defeat to Leeton with a minor hamstring injury.
The vast majority of his 300 games have been in the top grade after he celebrated his 200th senior game in 2017.
Although the competition has been reduced to just six rounds and six teams, Cohalan said early results suggest it will be a difficult flag to win as the Goannas chase their first premiership since 1993.
"You sort of do wonder if it's one that sits with an asterisk, don't you?," he said.
"I know a lot of people have their view on it, and I guess my view is if anything it's been one of the hardest ones to stay motivated in.
"We got to a point where we were about to play our only trial match against North Wagga and we were told on the day it'd been shut down, and when we started again it happened again.
"We went through a three or four month period where you're doing fitness sessions and catching up on Zoom with your teammates or separating into groups for circuits, and you didn't know if you were doing it for no reason.
"For mine, people will be able to remember who wins this one. If you sat back in 30 years time and asked 'who won the RFL grand final in 2020' people may struggle to answer, but if you ask 'who won the grand final when the season was cut short by COVID?', I reckon that's probably an answer people will have for you."
The former captain is proud of his decision to remain loyal to the one club and is hopeful a premiership is the reward.
"It's good to be able to do it at one club, although I'm probably more so I'm interested in senior game milestones," he said.
"The good thing about club milestones is you can sit back and say I've done all this for one club, which is a pretty pleasing thing to be able to say."
Cohalan said the Goannas have the arsenal to lift when it matters most, with the top four teams to contest finals.
"We probably got our ball movement back to where it needed to be (against Osborne) and converted a bit better from inside 50s," he said.
"It's a strange comp, you look at the results every week and there's another club putting their name up as a contender.
It's certainly going to be a hard one to win but we've got some confidence in the group that if we click when we need to, we have the ability to be competitive at the top end of the season."
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