Local Steve Barons contributes to massive QLD victory
BEERWAH Oztag Venue Manager and international star, Steve Barons, played in the winning Queensland squad at the National Oztag Championships on November 3-5.
Steve competed in the Oztag World Cup earlier this year, and although this was Steve’s sixth time playing at nationals, it was the first time a Queensland team has won in about 20 years.
“A lot of the players from our team have been trying for 15-20 years to get some sort of success down there,” he said.
“Fortunately, this time we got there, so there was four of us from the World Cup side in the Queensland side, which was a good opportunity to get back together and we have done quite well.”
The Queensland side in Steve’s division faced up against three New South Wales teams, playing the final against the Illawarra Steelers, with Steve scoring Queensland’s first try, ultimately winning 3-2.
“I scored the first try of the match so we were 1-0, and then we were down 2-1, and then we came back to win 3-2 so it was a seesawing match, so 1-0 to 1-1 to 2-1 to 2-2 to 3-2 with a winning try from our team in the end,” he said.
“I don’t like to talk about who scores tries from any team, because I like to look at it as a team effort and the team combining their skills gets us the results.
“The Illawarra Steelers were in the grand final last year too and also lost the nationals grand final to another team.”
Barons said the event had a great atmosphere, and that the competitiveness was very enjoyable.
“It was a great competition, we did quite well, we won every game and from the start we played really well together, we’ve been training together for about three months, there was a lot of preparation,” he said.
“It was as good of a competition that we could have in Australia I feel. The World Cup obviously provided a bigger playing pool to compete against and that was quite tough.
“The experience we had from playing in these different tournaments held us in good stead. It’s all been really good actually and it’s come together quite well. We’ll see if we can hold onto it again next year.”
Steve is now looking forward to competing at another competition himself in March next year.
“I’ve got the State Cup coming up in March of next year, so that’ll just be at Sunshine Coast Stadium, and we will start training for that in a couple of months time,” he said.
“We will have three other guys who were in our victorious nationals side and also the ones that went over to the World Cup with us, so we’re hoping to have a pretty good side there, see if we can have the bragging rights of who contributed the most for our nationals title.
“Our nationals team will be broken up into three different teams for separate regions in the State Cup, and there will be seven teams in that competition overall.”