Hockey: Kiwis clean sweep Tamworth men's premierships

Kiwis dominated Saturday's Tamworth men's hockey grand finals winning all three grades to make it a clean sweep of the silverware with their masters team winning on Wednesday night.

It's the first time they have won all four men's premierships. In both first and second grade they were also minor premiers, helping secure the club their first club championship.

They also won the under-13s and 15s boys, the 13s in double extra-time.

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"This year was just the year of the Kiwis it feels," Burrows said.

"A lot of things fell into place."

First grade completed the sweep with a 4-1 win over defending champions South United, who had defeated them in the 2020 decider.

Kiwis' first first grade premiership since 2017, Burrows said he was extremely proud of the way they conducted themselves and how they played

Conscious of Souths' counter-attacking capabilities, he said they were mindful of starting well and making them chase.

"We knew the longer that we sort of went without a goal, the harder it would become for us," he said.

"We wanted to get out in front and stay there and fortunately we were able to to that."

"They had quite a few good chances. But Sam Griffiths in goals, he's been excellent all year and he was excellent again in the grand final.

"He made a couple of absolutely crucial saves, just to keep us where we wanted to be."

Up the other end, George Nash scored a double and was awarded the Butch Southwell Medal as the player of the grand final. It was good reward for what has been a really consistent year for the striker.

"He was just in the right places," Burrows said.

"He's really deadly. I don't think there's anyone who hits the ball harder in Tamworth hockey than George Nash. But ironically, it was probably very delicate finesse touches, that got the goals for him on the weekend as opposed to absolutely crushing it through the backboard."

"But in saying that every player on the field for us just had a good game, which is ideally what you want in a grand final but is very difficult to do."

Just their fourth first grade premiership, it was the second Burrows has been involved in after being part of the 2006 side.

He said the success was well deserved and credited it to a few factors.

They are very fortunate to have good depth "in multiple positions and in multiple grades".

Their attitude to training was also great.

"We had a consistently really good turn out to training, which made a huge difference towards the back end of the year when the players are obviously very familiar with each other having trained really consistently all year," he said.

It was also testament to the hard work that as a club they have put in, as the overall success was.

"It was a club effort and an enormous club result for us," Burrows said.

"And it was just satisfying throughout the day for each team to realise their success because they'd all worked hard."

He was part of two premierships on the day, playing in the second grade grand final. Kiwis won that 3-2, third grade 2-1 and masters 3-2.