AT the start of each rugby league season I have a crack at naming a Western Division team for that year.
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For my own amusement more than anything. Why not - I reckon if Andrew Johns can name a NSW Blues team and not have James Tedesco in it, I'm a shout at this anyway.
Naturally, it’ll often include a few wild cards.
This year I like the look of CYMS recruit Mitch Davis at prop - big year ahead for the former Albury star - while Workies’ No.1 Keelan Bresac has impressed over the last 12 months and wouldn’t look out of place on the rep scene.
There’s some locks, if fit and available, and former NRL players George Rose (Oberon) and Isaac Gordon (Dubbo CYMS) would be two of those.
Another on that list ahead of 2016 was, for mine, Terry Brown.
The Blayney halfback had come along immensely in the last two seasons with the Bears, broke into the Group 10 team last year and, maybe if selection politics didn’t play a such a big part, would have been in the green and white of Western Division in 2015.
He should have been there.
Evasive speed, perfect direction, a sweetly timed pass and a deft kicking game; for a 22-year-old, Brown’s play at pivot was more akin to a play-maker with a decade’s worth of first grade footy under his belt than a kid just breaking onto the scene.
He was ready in 2015 and I was banking on him starting the year in irresistible form for the Bears - Darren Jackson couldn’t not pick him.
Brown went missing after a cliff dive off Boomerang Beach, on the state’s mid-north coast, on Easter Sunday.
I held off writing this column earlier last week in the hope Terry would be found. Like everyone in Orange, from those who knew him like a brother to those who simply knew the smiling face down the street, I hoped for a miracle.
If ever there was going to be one, it would be for a bloke who produced so many with the Steeden every weekend from late-February until mid-September - with a handful of clubs in just about every code.
That miracle, sadly, tragically, hasn’t come.
The tributes for Brown began last Saturday.
The Group 10 All Stars contest - a game the dynamic No.7 would have lined up proudly for the Indigenous side - observed a minute silence, while also naming the man of the match award the Terry Brown medal - very fitting.
A premiership winner at the club in 2014, the Orange City Lions also remembered their mate prior to beginning their season against the Boars in Parkes with a moving show of unity between grades before kick-off of firsts.
The touching moments will continue this Sunday when the Group 10 season kicks off, particularly at Blayney’s King George Oval, where Brown’s teammates will play their first game minus their young general.
Everyone of those people is still waiting for Terry - a son, a brother and a friend to so, so many - to be found. To come home. They have been for the last week-and-a-half.
And for many of them, when that first ball is kicked on Sunday from Bathurst to Orange and Oberon to Blayney, he will be.