AT last, it’s the season the Loddon Valley league has been craving.
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![At last, Loddon Valley flag race is wide open At last, Loddon Valley flag race is wide open](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/G3M3FqVFYHjdnjXX9zgHHX/ef4db1fa-7131-43aa-81e9-4c1d8025bc5a.jpg/r1144_246_2336_2213_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
A season in which the premiership is genuinely wide open, rather than what has become the norm in recent years of the sense that everyone outside of Bridgewater was playing for second.
The shadow of Bridgewater has loomed large over the Loddon Valley since 2010, the birth year of what has become the greatest dynasty in league history with it the first season of the Mean Machine’s record seven-straight premierships.
The Mean Machine may yet win an eighth flag in a row this year and it would be foolish to write them off, but at least at the halfway mark of the season the 2017 premiership appears well and truly up for grabs.
Kudos to all that Bridgewater achieved between 2010 and 2016 for it raised the bar in the Loddon Valley that no other side could get to – although, Bears Lagoon-Serpentine made a good fist of it in 2013 – but the fact the Mean Machine has dropped right back to the pack this season has breathed desperately new life into the competition.
The Loddon Valley league has been one dominated by dynasties this millennium.
The Mean Machine’s seven flags in a row from 2010 came in the wake of what had been six-straight premierships for Calivil United between 2003 and 2008 – at one stage it won 44 games in a row – with Mitiamo’s 2009 grand final victory over the Demons as the brief interlude in between.
Two clubs sharing 13 of the past 14 premierships has long given the Loddon Valley league a sense of predictability. Even if Calivil United had only been the best team of the home and away season in two of its six flags on the trot, come the heat of finals you knew the Demons would find another gear.
This season the Demons have established themselves as the side to beat. They are 8-0, but haven’t blowing the opposition off the park week after week.
Below is a chasing pack of five in the resurgent Bears Lagoon-Serpentine, fellow improver Newbridge, Bridgewater, Mitiamo and Pyramid Hill – one of which will miss the finals – who all look capable of making a mark in September.
For the best part of the past seven years the Loddon Valley league could have already had the premiership cup engraved for Bridgewater at this time of year, but this is finally shaping as the season in which the flag is anything but a one-horse race.
And that’s good for footy.
Luke West – sports reporter