JORDAN JONES PLAYER COLUMN – FOXTEL CUP

A WEST Perth premiership player will be writing a column for the club's website every week of the 2014 WAFL season. This week's edition is Jordan Jones' latest offering.

THIS Tuesday night is a great opportunity for myself to play back at home in Geelong and for us as a team to try to win another competition. It's something that you don’t get the chance to do that often given the Foxtel Cup is a very specific competition and to take West Perth back to my home town now and play in front of all my mates is going to be unreal. It will especially mean a lot to play in front of my family because it's pretty tough for them to get over to see games in Perth and even to come see me, so it's going to be good to get home and to even show the boys around good old Geelong.

I am excited about it. What I do know is that it's going to be very cold but I am excited because I know it's a really good ground to play on, and one of the best surfaces I've ever played on. It's a really good deck and it's exciting to take all my mates here at West Perth to go and play in front of the mates I grew up with, went to school with and my family.

I wasn’t planning on getting the chance to go and play back in Geelong anytime soon unless I end up playing local footy there years and years down the track, but I certainly didn’t expect to get the chance to play at this standard of footy back there so it's good in that respect.

I have actually played there once since I moved over to Perth when I was with West Coast against Geelong in 2010 and I remember most of that game. We ended up getting pumped and Gary Ablett had about 14 touches in the third quarter to win the game for them, but it was a massive day for me to play an AFL game in front of all my friends and family in Geelong. That was very similar to the Foxtel Cup grand final this week, but back on that day I remember running into Brad Ottens and he absolutely flattened me.

I didn’t actually watch a lot of footy at the ground growing up because I was an Essendon supporter and I always tended to be playing around the same time a lot of the games were on. I guess it was when I started training there with the Geelong Falcons when I started going to the ground quite a bit and I started to then have a fair bit to do with the oval.

That development squad with the Falcons starts in under-15s so I started when I was 13 all the way until I was 18 so that was pretty much my junior footy club. The development side of things there is really good to have the access to train on an AFL ground. They have a small connection to the Geelong Football Club, but the Falcons themselves have their own good little set up.

It's fair to say the stadium has changed a fair bit since I was last there now. I was talking up to all the boys about how good the surface is and how good of a deck it is, but then I realised that it now has a massive grandstand and it has changed a lot. It is going to be a really nice stadium to play at, though, and a lot of the boys are excited to play there. A few of the boys are worried that it's going to be freezing cold at 8.30 on Tuesday night, but we'll have to try and sneak out a few long sleeve jumpers for some of the lads to help them cope.

I'm actually looking forward to the game itself as well. It's a grand final and we want to play well. It's a game that we want to go over and win so that's the mindset we are taking over with us. We haven’t won too much this year, but we are trying to improve in every aspect and this is another game where we can get better in. Obviously there is prize money up for grabs, but I truly believe that won't be in the mind of the players. We want to go out and win the game, and try to get our season back on track and give ourselves some momentum to take into the last six games of the season for us.

Trips away as a team can bring you closer together and all the boys are travelling over Monday, and we have Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday all together. Hopefully it does bring us a bit closer. Then backing it up on Saturday is going to be a tough ask, but we are going to be very professional about it, we've got good medical staff and we'll be doing everything right in terms of our recovery. We'll have ice baths and stretching straight after the game, and even do all the right things on the plane. In the AFL system you do similar things and we'll do the best we can to be ready for East Perth on Saturday.

For me, I was able to head across on Friday and when you are working full-time and playing football, you don't get the chance to do it very often. I grabbed the chance to get back for the weekend and it gave me the chance to catch up with a lot of family and friends I hadn’t seen for a while. It was my birthday a couple of weekends ago so it will be good to see the ones who couldn’t make it over to Perth for that.