Player Column – Dylan Ross Second Semi-Final

THIS year hasn’t been the greatest for myself personally. I've had a few challenges to go through and it's come to the pointy end of the season now where I've hit some form, but unfortunately the league boys aren’t in the finals.

I'm just putting all my concentration now into the finals series with the twos. Everyone goes through a tough year from time to time, but you just have to deal with it and push on from it.

I reckon my last three or four games in the twos had been really solid and I put some good numbers up, played some good footy and my defensive side was really good as well. If the league team was still alive I'd like to think I'd be knocking on the door to get a game by now, and if I got selected or not that would be up to the match committee.

In terms of my footy, I've always said that as long as I am enjoying it that I would keep trying to play at the highest level possible. I enjoy playing in the WAFL and the professionalism of it, so even though this has been a tough year for myself, I am certainly still looking to stay around again next year to try and bounce back strongly.

The other thing is I would like to help our league side back into the finals after a tough few years. Most of our twos team is now very young and we've had a lot of success over the last few years with the colts, so there are only good times ahead for South Fremantle. I was there in a similar situation at Claremont with a couple of tough years, but the young fellas came through and they ended up having a team that finished on top of the ladder four straight years. Hopefully I can be part of something similar here at South Freo.

As I said, I haven’t had the greatest year and it has been tough at times, but coming back and running around enjoying my footy is something you take for granted at times so I've enjoyed my time back in the twos. It's been very enjoyable and the boys have all welcomed me back, and we've had such a good side that it's been fun to be part of.

This is now the time of the year you want to be playing. The weather has got a bit warmer and it's an exciting time to be playing footy, and hopefully we have a win on Sunday against Subi and then can knock on the door for a premiership in a couple of weeks' time.

I honestly think it would be disappointing if we didn't end up with the premiership. The record of 18-2 means you have had a fantastic season, but that's only half the job done and all the pressure is on us now to win it. But we have the group with their heads switched on about things and we know we have some hard work still to do, but a premiership is in the sights and anything less would be a disappointment.

We have a lot of young guys, but we would all love to send off Paul Mugambwa with a flag. If you ask anyone about Gumby around the club and he might be the oldest on the list, but he can definitely get around the young fellas. I've got to know him pretty well over the last few years and he's a ripping bloke, and there would be no better way to send him off.

Subiaco has been the team throughout the year that have caused us the most problems and challenged us the most. We've had some fairly close games against them and it just goes to show how good a club they are with their depth. We have no doubt that they will roll out a strong side against us on Sunday.

The final five system this year is a bit of an interesting one. I'm not too sure on the format and I don’t know how they came up with it, but it was good for us to freshen up last week and now we'll run around again on Sunday. It just is what it is, and you have to go through what needs to be done and we'll deal with each week as it comes.

It's probably not ideal to have another break next week if we happen to win on Sunday and I definitely think we'd prefer to have had one less week off. But in saying that we had a pretty good hit out with an intra-club game down here last week and leading into the finals we had a couple of easier games, so it was good to have a hit out last week. It's an interesting finals format, though, but our hands are tied and we can't do much about that.

A few of our league guys have been in and out of training over the last week or so to watch us train, and some have even joined in. I'm sure a lot of them will be there to watch us on Sunday at Leederville, it would be pretty disappointing if they weren’t!