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Thursday, 12 January 2017

STARTING on the road with the first 11 games as defending Men’s National Water Polo League premiers will provide quite the challenge for the UWA Torpedoes, but title winning captain Luke Quinlivan is confident good away form can set up the season quite nicely.

The Torpedoes men broke through in 2016 for the club’s first NWPL premiership defeating the Victorian Seals in the gold medal match in Melbourne in a penalty shootout.

Quinlivan was a huge part in that, succeeding in the penalty shootout and captaining the Torpedoes to the premiership in what was his 299th game in the NWPL.

Many of the Torpedoes team took part in the Water Polo WA Premier League late in 2016 for the UWA City Beach Bears who went on to beat the Melville Sharks in the Grand Final to earn another premiership for UWA.

Those two winning performances were Quinlivan’s last as captain with family and work commitments seeing him hand over the job as skipper to the newly appointed Nick Hughes for the 2017 season.

That confidence and preparation before Christmas was ideal. In the couple of weeks since the Torpedoes have had a strong training camp with Guangdong from China in preparation for the NWPL season.

That all gets underway this Thursday and Friday with two games against the Adelaide Jets before two games against a newly formed Victorian team across the weekeend.

While Quinlivan knows the challenge ahead with the opening 11 games away from UWA, with 10 interstate and one against Fremantle at Bicton Pool, he feels with their preparation there is every chance the Torpedoes can put themselves in a strong position.

Then once they hit their home pool on Thursday February 23 against the UTS Balmain Tigers it could be time to really make a statement as the reigning premiers.

“The fact that we are well-prepared and we’ve put in the work early I would suggest having the road trips early is actually a good thing for us this year,” Quinlivan said.

“Half our season will be played by the time we have our first home game and that can either work incredibly well for you, or it can go very poorly against you. A lot of it comes down to if you’ve got yourself to a level where you’re happy with and other clubs might not be as well-prepared.

“That can give you a huge advantage because we would have played all our tough road games early on so we can consolidate each week and focus more on finals because by the time we play at home we will have a very good idea whether we are going to be playing in finals or not.

“If we’ve won a good 70 per cent of those away games, it’s an almost certainty that we would play finals. That would mean we can make sure we are fresh and peaking at the right time. That’s not something you always have the ability to do if you have a heavy-handed road trip right before finals or later in the season.”

Preparation and how well you are ready for any season is always difficult to judge until the action gets underway as Quinlivan well knows from his 299 games of experience in the NWPL.

But he can’t fault the preparation work the Torpedoes have put in coming into 2017 and that has him confident that his team is ready to go starting with the road games in Adelaide to kick things off.

“In my experience you never know how well you have prepared for a season until you start playing games. Traditionally we’ve had pretty good preparation because we do train more than any other club, going twice a day most days of the week, so in terms of being fit and strong enough to play, and having had enough time to practice our systems I’m usually confident,” he said.

“We’ve had a lot of junior players come through with us the last couple of years and when you do that the quicker you have to learn how to play together. Where some of the other stronger clubs like Wests, their list hasn’t really changed too much over the past four or five years.

“For this year in particular we’ve had two weeks training with the Guangdong coming out to Perth from China so we’ve played scrimmages and training matches against them four or five times a week.

“That’s obviously as good a preparation as any club could hope to have so that gives us a lot of confidence and shows us where our areas of improvement are, and where we are doing well. I’d like to say that in terms of preparation coming into the season we couldn’t have done much more.”

Quinlivan has no doubt that the Torpedoes will have a target on their back this season as reigning premiers, but that doesn’t concern him in the slightest.

“As a general rule, any reigning premier will have a target on their back. Everybody has to pay you the respect that you have won the previous season but at the same time, I don’t think you could say that any specific from the top six from last season was the standout that it was a foregone conclusion they would win,” Quinlivan said.

“My view was that an of the top six teams was capable of winning on their day. Cronulla, I thought played the better of four quarters against Victoria in regular time but it did go to penalties and Victoria won and played us in the final while Cronulla finished sixth.

“Of our games, we won two of them in penalty shootouts and one of them by a solitary goal. Coming into this season, anybody who has been around the game long enough would understand that any of the top six teams that are in form are going to be capable of winning. Teams will have that little bit of attention on us whereas traditionally in the past we flew under the radar as an underdog.”

One thing that being the defending premiers will change for the Torpedoes is that they won’t be able to fly under the radar as underdogs anymore. Quinlivan enjoyed being able to do that in the past, but to now have won a premiership it’s worth the extra scrutiny it brings.

“One thing I did notice in the pre-finals hype and coverage last year was that we were the only team not talked about. I always think that’s a good thing,” he said.

“Teams like Drummoyne were focused on Wests, Sydney Uni and Victoria as the home side, and other teams seemed to reflect the same sentiment and didn’t talk about us.

“I think that helped us fly under the radar and go on to win. This year we won’t have that luxury but any of the top six teams again going into the finals will be able to beat anybody.”

Quinlivan also hopes that the Torpedoes players who took part in the Premier League Grand Final win over the Melville players who play NWPL with Fremantle will gain some added confidence from that.

But really the rivalry between the Torpedoes and Mariners is strong enough without needing any extra incentives or motivation.

“From when Melville first started to play in the Premier League and up until the last couple of years, they have proven themselves as the most consistently high performing club,” Quinlivan said.

“They might not be quite as strong now as they were and given we were coming from the bottom of the ladder as a traditionally underperforming club wanting to become a consistent top four team, we had to eat a lot of humble pie in the early years.

“We built this heavy rivalry with Fremantle, which is healthy, and in the last couple of years things have evened out between us where if either team wants to win on the day, they have to play a good brand of water polo.

“It’s a good, healthy competition to have but certainly when we went into the Premier League Grand Final, our position was that if we don’t win this game they would have a psychological edge over us going into the National League. We didn’t want that.

“We knew that we should get over the line if we played well and we are now hoping to take that into the first game against them at Bicton. Fremantle is never a pushover, they are a strong club and the guys who play for them have heart and will play to the end. It doesn’t really matter what we’ve done before any game, playing them is always hard and we’ve developed that rivalry now.”

Media references

Originally Published at https://uwatorpedoeswpc.com.au/preparation-key-for-reigning-premier-torpedoes-on-the-road/

Mia Herriman

UWA Sport

[email protected]

6488 4309

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