A bumper crowd is expected at North Hobart Oval on Saturday as the Tasmania Devils fight to keep their VFL premiership dream alive.
The Devils will host Essendon in a do-or-die semi-final, with tickets selling quickly and no sales available at the gate on the day.
Tasmania must win to keep its inaugural VFL season alive after last week’s qualifying final loss to Geelong.
Coach Jeromey Webberley said the Devils were good enough to go all the way, despite the setback.
“I feel like our year warrants winning a couple of finals and I feel like we’ve got a team good enough to win the premiership,” Webberley said.
“Although last week was disappointing, we played some really good footy but didn’t make the most of our opportunity.”
The Devils are now facing the prospect of going out in straight sets, but Webberley said they had another opportunity to show what they could do.
“We have got a great chance on Saturday, we will stay in the game for long periods of time and hopefully this week we will take our chances,” he said.
Standing between Tasmania and a preliminary final is an Essendon side packed with AFL experience.
The Bombers’ elimination-final team included 16 players who had played AFL this season.
“They’ve got 18 AFL-listed players and I don’t know how many of them have played AFL this year but it would be a fair amount,” Webberley said.
“They have got some really good experience and some really good young talent.”
“They have big talls ahead of the ball that are going to create headaches for us and some really exciting smalls as well and solid inside mids.”
Webberley said the Devils would make one change to their team, based on how they wanted to play at North Hobart.
“We feel like we need to make a change based around how our game needs to look on this ground,” he said.
The semi-final starts at 11:05am on Saturday.
