When Geoff Burdett was in his pomp as a player with the Hopetoun footy club in the old Southern Mallee league, he despised his club's arch-rival located 25kms south down the Henty Highway.

"No one hated Beulah more than me," he said.

Burdett was part of some brutal contests between the Devils and the Blues. There were grand finals in 1990 and '91, the first won by Beulah and the second by Hopetoun.

Before that, there were four consecutive premiership deciders between 1973 and '76, of which Hopetoun won three.

"In the '75 grand final – and we've got a reunion for that this year – we made a pact to give the Beulah coach, Bruce Mulligan, a bloody hard time because he'd fixed a few of us up the year before," Burdett recalled.

"Anyway, we won the fights and we won the premiership. Coming off the ground, I saw a lady coming towards me and I thought she was going to give me a kiss. But she belted me fair in the face with her fist.

"It was Bruce Mulligan's wife. She said, 'That's from me for Bruce.' Everybody still talks about that."

Back in those days, Burdett never contemplated that one day the young men from Hopetoun and Beulah might play on the same team. But, as he said during the week, "times change".

Last year, with the Mallee's ever-declining population putting a squeeze on player numbers, the members of the Hopetoun and Beulah football-netball clubs voted to put their 120-year rivalry behind them.

And Burdett, who played 37 games for Essendon between 1976 and '81, has played a key role in the formation of the new entity, the Southern Mallee Giants.

It was one of his ideas that the merged club be known as something other than Beulah-Hopetoun or Hopetoun-Beulah. And it was his idea to adopt the colours and nickname of the Greater Western Sydney AFL club.

"Everyone seemed keen on the idea of wearing GWS jumpers, so I got in contact with Kevin Sheedy, who was still with the Giants at that stage," Burdett explained. "Sheeds offered us some support, and it went from there."

Burdett has also taken on the role as the Southern Mallee Giants' first senior coach and has thrown himself into the job with gusto.

"He's probably the most excited guy in the club at the moment," Giants president Clayton Shannon said. "He's really taken it on and gone nuts with it, so it's been terrific."

Burdett's side will start the season as one of the favourites for the Mallee league flag. That's largely because the merger of Beulah and Hopetoun and the exit of Jeparit-Rainbow to the Horsham District league has left the MFL with just five clubs.

"I'll definitely get the sack if we don't make the finals," Burdett joked.

This is almost certain to be the last season of the Mallee league, which started with 12 clubs when the Northern and Southern Mallee competitions came together for the 1997 season.

The Giants are banking on a move to the Horsham District league next year, but their future, along with that of the other four MFL clubs, is up in the air until AFL Victoria Country hands down a review into the future of footy in the region.

A number of preliminary findings will be released in late April, with the full report to be handed down in June.

When it comes to the communities of Beulah and Hopetoun, there is no doubt that the merger of their key sporting clubs will have an impact on the local economies, given each town will go from hosting eight games a year to four.

But the new club is doing its best to soften the blow.

"Just things like buying all our beer through the local pubs is very important," Shannon said.

"Everything we buy for the footy club goes through a local business. We're just happy to pay the price and that seems to have kept people happy."

In fact, the merger has been a remarkably smooth process to this point.

"Even at training runs we've been getting 35 to 40 blokes on the track, but then we're also getting 35 to 40 blokes drinking beer while they watch it," Shannon said.

One of the few glitches so far has been a delay in the delivery of the club's new GWS-inspired guernseys, which meant the players had to wear old Hopetoun or Beulah jumpers turned inside out during their practice matches.

But that minor problem will fade into insignificance when Sheedy travels to the Mallee on Thursday to launch the club's first home and away campaign.

Two days later, the Giants will start their first home and away campaign by taking on the Sea Lake-Nandaly Tigers at Sea Lake.

SOUTHERN MALLEE GIANTS FNC

* The old Beulah footy club was a powerhouse prior to the merger with Hopetoun, winning senior premierships in the Mallee league in 2000, '03, '04, '05 and 2010. Hopetoun won its most recent senior flag in 1991.

* The towns of Beulah and Hopetoun, which are 25kms apart, have a combined population of about 800. Both towns have one pub.

* The town of Hopetoun is named after Scottish aristocrat John Adrian Louis Hope, who was Victorian Governor between 1889 and 1895 and later became Australia's first Governor-General.

By Adam McNicol