Weekly Times |MALLEE Football League’s fate appears sealed with the final recommendations for the North West Structural Review released this week.
The review panel’s decisions regarding where certain clubs will play from next season remained unchanged from the initial recommendations released in April.
The final report recommends the Mallee league wind up at the end of this season, with the remaining five clubs to be distributed to surrounding competitions.
Ouyen United and Walpeup Underbool have been advised to merge and join the Sunraysia league, while the Southern Mallee Giants would join the Horsham and District competition next season.
The panel’s preference is for the Sea Lake Nandaly and Woomelang Lascelles to merge and join the Central Murray Football League. Alternatively they can join the North Central or Golden Rivers leagues as separate entities, but these are “less than satisfactory” or “short-term” options, according to the panel.
The final report states that the preliminary recommendation remained unchanged as “additional time will be required” to ensure negotiations between all the parties are finalised in this instance.
Wakool from the Golden Rivers league has also been advised to merge with Barham Koondrook and compete in the Central Murray league.
AFL Central Murray, Sunraysia and Wimmera Mallee region general manager Bruce Petering said the final report allowed a longer time frame for some of the recommendations to be implemented.
While a merged entity between the Tigers and Cats joining the Central Murray league was preferable to the panel, he said there were a other options.
“We’ll give them time to work through those options,” he said.
And Petering said there was no requirement for a forced merger “in the near future”.
“I think forced mergers have been tried before and they certainly don’t work. It needs to be a negotiated position between the two clubs,” he said.
“We will manage that negotiation if we need to, but we want everyone to have a fair input into what they do.”
Woomelang Lascelles vice president Tim McClelland said club members had a week remaining to return a survey which direction the club should seek to go.
“I haven’t got any indication which way the club wants to go, whether it wants to pursue a merger, or wants to pursue moving leagues, or disbanding at this stage,” he said.
Sea Lake Nandaly’s committee has voted in favour of the Tigers pursuing a move to the North Central league, but president Paul Summerhayes said if the Cats indicated they would be interested in pursuing a merger the proposal would go to the Tigers’ members.
Despite preliminary talks between the two clubs earlier in the year, there has been no discussion about a merger between the two clubs since the initial report was released.
