The Miners had the better of the early exchanges, causing an early scare when a diving header from Mick Van Moolenbroek to a low cross from the right thudded into the advertising hoardings behind Strikers goalkeeper David Chambers’ near post.  And the Strikers narrowly survived another heart-stopping moment when captain John Costello turned a similar cross against his own post.

The intensity of the Miners’ work all over the park prevented the Strikers getting into any early rhythm, and the nearest the home side came to a goal inside the opening twenty-five minutes was when Hews played a corner kick from the right firmly to the feet of Chris Di Sipio, who scampered around his defender to blaze an angled shot just over the Miners’ crossbar.

The match was cracked open, however, in the twenty-seventh minute when the Miners won a free kick fifteen yards inside the Strikers’ half, out wide on the right near the grandstand. The dead ball was hoisted high towards the six-yard area and the back post, where Miners centre forward Dan Corbett fell forward heavily under challenge from Strikers fullback Lorenzo Sipi as they contested a header.  Referee Sam Williams decided he didn’t like what he saw, and awarded Corbett a penalty, which was predictably enough much to Sipi’s disgust.  Van Moolenbroek then stepped up to take the spot kick and, although Chambers guessed correctly in diving to his right and was able to get a hand to Van Moolenbroek’s shot, the ball was struck too hard for him and finished up in the back of the net to give the Miners the lead.

The soft way the opening goal was conceded was certainly upsetting for the Strikers, but eleven minutes later a double dose of disaster hit them when a Miners midfielder burst free thirty metres from the Strikers’ goal with the ball at his feet, after the ball had bounced kindly for him out of a couple of solid tackles in midfield. The midfielder unleashed a stinging low shot that Chambers, diving to his right, did well to palm away from goal. But a second later the ball was in the back of his net after it struck Henderson, who was arriving at speed in an attempt to provide cover and could not get out of the way of the deflected ball. Henderson could only despair as both he and the ball ended up inside the goal to the delight of the Miners, who now had a two-goal lead.

And so it stayed until the half time break, as the Strikers struggled to carve out genuine scoring opportunities while Van Moolenbroek came close to extending his team’s lead with an opportunist shot on the turn which sent the ball fizzing just wide of the junction of post and crossbar on the Strikers’ goal frame.

So the Strikers went into their dressing room knowing that they were in real trouble.  While they had managed nine shots on goals to the Miners’ four, none of them had troubled  Miners goalkeeper Brad Moss, who had watched either go wide of his goal or had been untroubled to deal with a header and a shot from Di Sipio, and a further shot from midfielder Michael Angus, that went straight at him.  If the Strikers were to get out of trouble it was evident that they had to lift their game considerably in the second half.

They did exactly that, but were to be denied by inspired goalkeeping from Moss and some desperate goal-line defending as the Miners dug deep to resist everything that the resurgent home side could throw at them

Typical of what was to come, the Strikers were unfortunate not to pull a goal back four minutes after the restart when Sipi overlapped down the right touchline to deliver a cross to the back post that Moss went underneath.  Di Sipio met the ball with a strong header that was on target but struck the back of a Miners defender, who had jumped a fraction later, before bouncing out of play for a corner.

As the Strikers poured forward they were to win a succession of corner kicks.  One of these was met by a header from Henderson that was scrambled clear by the Miners as far as Di Sipio, whose shot with his left foot was cleared off the Miners’ goal line for another corner.  And then a chance went begging when Thurtell, working in a tight corner near the byline again down the Strikers’ right channel, wriggled free of his defender to whip a pass across the face of the Miners’ goal that was missed at full stretch by two team mates before the ball ran to fullback Jack Boxell, on the other side of the penalty area, who blazed his shot a foot or so over the crossbar.

All of this had happened within the opening ten minutes of the second half.  But the fact that none of this frantic action had led to a goal did not bode well for the Strikers, who were now well on top in terms of exerting authority over their opponents in general play but were still two behind on the scoreboard.  As the home team’s pressure continued, Sipi jinked infield from the right to squeeze a pass acrossfield to Robinson, whose shot looked bound for the top left corner of the Miners’ goal and would have nestled there had it not been for a brilliant one-handed save from the leaping Moss.  Even then, the ball dropped for Boxell, who squared it back to Robinson, who had a second go from twenty yards but this time drove his shot over the top.

The Miners clung tenuously to their lead as the hour ticked over and the yellow tide continued washing towards their goal.   Moss performed more heroics in the sixty-fourth minute to acrobatically tip over a twenty-five yard effort from King, out wide on the left, that was aimed with laser-like precision just underneath his crossbar.

Midway through the half, with nothing going for his team, Large brought on Jonti Richter for his first taste of football since injuring himself in mid-May, sending him to the left wing as Boxell made way and King was moved to Boxell’s fullback position, while Miners coach Graham Harvey brought on Tim Curtain for winger Jordan Corte. 

For five minutes or so the Miners managed to turn back the tide, enjoying a few attacking raids of their own which came to nought.  But it was backs-to-the-wall stuff again for the visitors as the game went into its last quarter, with Moss somehow managing to deflect a Hews free kick off his goal line and away to safety off the underside of his crossbar as the Strikers continued to curse their luck.

Moss was in some kind of goalkeeper’s heaven by this stage of the match, but even he was left helpless shortly afterwards as a high ball came in to the Miners’ penalty area and Thurtell leapt athletically to drive in a powerful header from eight yards that had Moss beaten.  But this time it was Miners centre half Michael Leslie who showed great positioning and reflexes to head the ball off his goal line from right underneath the crossbar.

The Strikers were working both wings to good effect, and Richter’s pace was giving the Miners plenty to worry about down the left.  It was Richter, in fact, who would have what turned out to be the last shot in anger for the Strikers when Hews aimed yet another corner kick low in Richter’s direction near the edge of the penalty area.  With the Miners’ defence caught napping, Richter’s first-time shot on the turn was not struck as cleanly as he would have liked and looped a few inches over Moss’s crossbar with the ‘keeper having had time to get himself in good position had the ball dropped a few inches lower.

By now it was apparent that absolutely nothing was going for the Strikers, and that included the refereeing as a number of contentious decisions over the ensuing minutes took the momentum out of their play.    And as the last ten minutes ticked by the Miners, sensing victory, exhorted each other to stay the course as the Strikers grew ever more desperate to get the one goal that would give them some hope of sending the game into extra time.

But it was not to be. The Miners had done enough and, as the game went into stoppage time, they almost struck the last blow themselves as they attacked down their right flank.  A low square ball across the face of the Strikers’ penalty ran to Corbett, whose right-footed shot had plenty of venom in it and was heading inside the near post, but was turned away by the outstretched left glove of the diving Chambers, whose goalkeeping on the night was exemplary despite the scoreline.

Unfortunately for the home side, however, so was that of Brad Moss who, in the end, might just have earned himself the Miners’ man of the match award for a second half in which his refusal to be beaten was the key factor in their fourth successive clean sheet.

In the post-match press conference Harvey congratulated the Strikers on winning the league, and his own players for shutting them out, before suggesting that the Miners had been drawn closer together by the circumstances surrounding the failure of the Mackay region to get a spot in the APL.

“It has motivated the players on a personal note’, Harvey said of the situation.  “It means they are all going to have to move on next year whether they’re from Mackay, or from Brisbane, or from overseas.  They know their future lies elsewhere. 

“As I said to the boys this week ‘you really are playing for your futures, if you get yourselves into a grand final it’s something to put on your CV and coaches and managers are more likely to have a look at you if you’ve got grand final experience’.  So that was their motivation for tonight and obviously, with the club not getting in the APL, they’ve got to look after themselves.”

Harvey also said that, with teams playing each other three times over the course of the season it was possible for coaches and players to learn a lot about their opposition, and video analysis had helped the Miners to hatch a successful game plan.  

“Our game plan was to play 4-4-2, but just to make sure that the second striker did his defensive role”, Harvey said.  “I think that where the Strikers have hurt us before is that they overload midfield and sometimes we get boxed in, and then when we get out of our ‘zones’ we’re in trouble. So we’ve worked very, very hard on sticking to our zones”. 

For the Strikers, Large said that there was not much they could have done differently on the night to have produced a better outcome.  He said the loss of the suspended Sean Burke had hurt, but it should not be used as an excuse because the team had coped well with formational changes designed to compensate for his absence.

“We probably just didn’t work as hard as what we should have done in the first half, that’s all”, said Large.  “I think we prepared well, we applied the changes okay, and I thought in the second half we did everything that we could possibly do to score goals, and it just didn’t work for us.  It was just one of those nights”.