Match Report

Round 2

Saturday 12 April 2025

AJAX v Old Camberwell

Episode 2 of 2025: The Four Sons

Happy Pesach and hope that the Seders have been an enjoyable time of family gathering and celebration. When you think about it, it took the Jews of Egypt 40 years to find their way from Cairo to Tel Aviv, a flight time of 3hours and 25 minutes nowadays. The Seder, and in particular the Haggadah, has become a more and more interesting place of learning for me as I’ve gotten older having to embrace where the whole family is at from both a religious and Hebraic viewpoint

When I was a young lad, my grandfather along with his brother in laws used to battle it out for Seder performance supremacy. We did the whole book from front to back in Hebrew, sang very song, and to be honest had a great night. For them it was all about who could tell the story the best, who could sing the loudest and in doing their thing, find new and improved ways to make sure that we didn’t finish before midnight. I think it was their way of sticking their finger up to the lives they’d had before emigrating to Australia and showing how proud they were to be Jewish

Roll the clock forward 50 years, we only do the fist half of the book, we sing most the songs and we go around the table and read all the stuff in between in english. When youstart reading the english translation, while most of it is repetitive, you do come across some interesting parts like the “Four Sons”To me the Four Sons represents a lot about the diversity of people and the challenge to understand their strengths and weaknesses, appreciating their backgrounds, education and simply put, who they are.

In the Magees we have all of that plus more. The strength of our team is our capacity to combine all of the above into a unified, cohesive and competitive group that will always show up and give the best of ourselves, but more importantly try our best for each other

We rolled out to Old Camberwell this week, which is technically Balwyn, and again demonstrated that respect and effort for each other. Having beaten Old Scotch on the junior kids oval the week before, we were elevated to the MCG size oval for prime time. Just like the Jews of Egypt, we were confronted with a lot of space to work our way through and a lot of heat, desert like heat!

The first quarter was a bit of a grind, but a few late goals got us off to a good start. The real work came in the second and third quarters where we kicked 8 goals to the oppositions 1. That half of football was everything about the Magees way of playing. We were tough, focused and despite suffering from the heat, we kept our pressure up and kept doing what we needed to do. Tyler again contested most of the ruck work and worked his way around the ground like a man who had done a preseason, Oren Tobias was fantastic around the contest and around transition from defence to attack, thecowboy Miles was ever reliable in the middle and of course, the back 7 were solid as a rock with Mitsel the Schnitzel, Feldy, Jacko and Mohr all working tirelessly down there.

Whilst we lost the elusive one in the Hoff, we were fortunate to have Kia Gold replace him who was fantastic across the whole game

A big welcome back to Charlie Gross and to our two newbies, Beau Worth and Toby Grodski, and reflecting on the theme of last week, more great AJAX families joining the Magees. Well done to both of you

Enjoy the Matzah, enjoy the break and we’ll see you for some more footy after Easter

Coach A

Goals: Gold 4, Ja Schwarz 2, Jo Schwarz 2, T Kavallero 2, M Hendel 1, A Rosenwax 1
Bests: O Tobias, T Southwick, K Gold, L Mitsel, D Feldman, M Gelfand