Yep.

And you can imagine how tense that was in the senior change rooms as those players are preparing to play the same opposition.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And those two clubs have been the most successful clubs in that competition throughout the 80s.

There was an incident, unfortunately, the year prior, so 1989, early in the season, where – I've got to get this right – where a Lavington player was knocked out by a Wodonga player.

So obviously that rivalry was there for a long period of time.

Yep.

There's a lot of hard feelings up

You, you sort of touched on it there, but was there a particular moment that sort of motivated you or inspired you?

Uh, to be honest, it was just a random thought one night, uh, just at home.

Um, and as I said, like yeah, grand finals always left an impression on me.

Uh, and I just thought this, there might be something in this idea potentially.

Uh, and there's, there's been a lot of books over the years on country footy and local footy and whatnot.

Uh, but to my knowledge, like there hasn't been a, a book on sort of a collection of grand final stories.

So I, uh, just canvassed the ideas of some former colleagues and people that I respect on, uh, firstly, if it was something that was worth pursuing.

Tough, tough to make a narrative out of 14 individual stories, I suppose.

How hard was it to decide which 14 made the final cut?

Uh, when I started out, Tommo, the idea I had in my head, uh, which foolishly in hindsight, was to cover every league around Victoria, which I don't know the number, I think there's 40-odd leagues around Victoria.

So I quickly moved on from that idea and, uh, I wanted each of the chapters to have a certain quirk or elements to that game and that chapter that were uni- unique to that game.

Uh, so I feel I was able to achieve that in the e- in, in the end product, and ultimately, um, we, I signed a publishing deal end of last year, and we wanted to get it out this year, and, uh, 14 wasn't a number we had in mind.

That was just sort of what we ended up with as we got closer to deadline, and, uh, I'd been working on it for over 18 months at that point in time.

So I was happy with what I had and, uh, felt there was enough there to, um, to put it together.

So covered most parts of Victoria in the end, which is what I did want to achieve.

Sorry.