Premiership Eagles visit the Pilbara
As players, they won the 2018 AFL grand final, off the field they’re the best of friends and last week two of the West Coast Eagles’ all-time greats visited the Pilbara.
The club’s all-time leading goal kicker Josh Kennedy and retired goal sneak Mark LeCras spent the week delighting football fans in Karratha, Exmouth and Port Hedland.
The pair shared some secrets with the crowd including who the dumbest player at the club was, an incident which occurred on a footy trip to Thailand and the special moment the two of them shared after the grand final siren sounded in 2018.
Kennedy said he turned to the sky and screamed pretty loudly, but after that his first thought was to look for LeCras.
“He was right next to me and I just spear tackled him into the ground,” he said.
“You go through so much together with training and games; we’re such good mates, so it was amazing to share that moment together.”
LeCras echoed that sentiment, saying it was a surreal moment which they would share forever.
“Throughout my career, I’d thought about how that movement would go if it ever happened and if I could have picked someone to be there, it would have been JK,” he said.
While Kennedy has continued to play on for the Eagles and plans to keep going for as long as he can, LeCras retired after 13 years and 219 games.
However, just one year away from the game was enough for the small forward, who has just been recruited to his former arch rivals, the Fremantle Dockers, as a part-time forward-line coach.
“It doesn’t feel like that big of a deal,” LeCras said. “It took a bit to get my head around but having a year away from the game made it easier and I feel like I still have something to give.”
Kennedy joked that LeCras was really working as a spy, but in the end he was happy his mate had returned to the game he loved.
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