NORTHERN Storm have had a tough start to their Coastal Premier League season.
Which was made all the more challenging by a big change in personnel from last season, as co-coach Craig Caruana explained.
“We lost our whole first grade team from last year, as they’ve playing 2nd grade,” he said.
“Not one of the players at the start of the season had played first grade together.”
Adding to this big change from one year to the next has been the lack of personnel available for the Storm this season.
“We haven’t been close to having our top team on the field this season,” he said.
“We’ve used between 41 and 47 players so far, and for the last four weeks we’ve had a lot of players out due to a number of reasons like family and coaching commitments, COVID, and injuries,” he said
Caruana said their best performance of the season so far came in last weeks 2-2 draw with Bellingen.
“We dominated big parts of the game against a team coming second on the ladder,” he said.
“We played our best game of the season against Bellingen, and the most pleasing thing was our players played for the whole 90 minutes even though we ran out of steam, as we haven’t played the full 90 minutes some times this season.”
Despite sitting near the bottom of the table, the Storm co-coach was looking forward to his side making a potential charge up the table in the second half of the season.
“We’ve got a lot of catch-up games coming up against teams in the lower half of the table, so hopefully they will be more competitive and a chance for the 3 points in each game,” he said.
“We lost a lot of players from last year, so I thought we’d be better in the second half of the season once we gelled.”
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