Terang Mortlake accomplished what every team in the Hampden competition strives to do, and that’s knock off Koroit.
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The Bloods became just the second team to beat the premiership favourite on Saturday.
Coach Michael Sargeant said the two-point win was pleasing, but that it wouldn’t be celebrated too much.
"Every time I coach I am a realist," he said.
"Just knocking off Koroit in round 17 doesn't mean the season has been a success.
“We want to be playing finals, so it's good to get the win, but you have to look at the bigger picture.
"And to Koroit's credit, obviously they always want to win, but I think they probably had one eye on the weeks ahead with finals.
“So we might have got the win, but we don't have finals to look forward to, so they are in the better situation."
Sargeant admitted the win meant little in the context of the season. Though he said he believed the Bloods still had plenty to play for.
"With Koroit having one eye on the coming weeks we thought we would be a chance to get a scalp," he said.
"And once we found out we got knocked out of finals (contention), for ourselves and our supporters we wanted to try and win the next few games.
"The previous season we had six wins, so if we didn't win we wouldn't have got improvement. But now we have and we want to win next week as well."
Koroit coach Chris McLaren didn’t shy away from stating his side’s second loss of the season was not a great concern.
McLaren, who re-signed with the club during the week, said the Saints were more focused on finals.
"The result doesn't really worry me with where we are on ladder and with finals coming up," he said.
"And we have loaded right up with training ahead of finals, doing extras sessions and we trained pretty hard on Monday night, so the boys were pretty sore from that.
"And in those condition it is quite physical and contested and when it is like that I think more players think that they have got plenty to lose.
"So I guess there is an element of self-preservation there a little bit."
Terang Mortlake will be hoping to finish off the season with back-to-back wins when it hosts Portland at home next week.
And Koroit will travel to Reid Oval to face Warrnambool, which is looming as a real threat ahead of finals, in the final round of the season.
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