SATURDAY FEBRUARY 27
Frankston vs Burnie Dockers at Frankston 4pm

From localfooty.com.au
Reported by Chris Cavanagh and Tim Michell for the Moreland Leader
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CALDER Cannons talent manager Ian Kyte would always toe the company line.

He would tell TAC Cup graduates who were not drafted by AFL clubs their best option was to head to VFL side Coburg, a traditional pathway club.

But deep down, he did not always believe what he was saying.

“Before I would be recommending that was a place that kids continue their career but I’m not sure I believed it myself,” Kyte said.

After splitting from its alignment with Richmond at the end of the 2012 season, some suggested Coburg would not survive a year as a stand-alone club.

How things have changed.

The Lions have thrived under the leadership of general manager Craig Lees and coach Peter German and building stronger bridges with the Cannons has been crucial to their success.

At least 22 of Coburg’s 60 listed players this year will be Calder graduates.

“If you look back to when Germo and I first got there at the start of 2014 there was maybe five Cannons on the list,” Lees said.

“No one wanted to go there. It wasn’t a pathway. So we’ve done really well.”

By the end of the 2014 season, Lees and German had a story to sell.

From The Age
Reported by
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Have you heard the one about the Jew and the Muslim? At Coburg it's no joke. Already a club with a reputation for promoting multiculturalism, the Lions took things one step further last week when they signed forward Jake Lew from amateur club AJAX.

Lew is Jewish, and is set to line up next year in perhaps the most ethnically diverse forward line ever assembled. Lew's signature follows that of former St Kilda goalsneak Ahmed Saad, a Muslim, who returns to state ranks to play alongside mates Danny Younan and Ozgur Uysal. Younan was born in Australia to a Lebanese mother and Syrian father, while Uysal is a Turk. The Lions' forward line also includes Lech Featherstone, who as detailed last year in Pssst, was named after a Polish union leader of the 1980s.

From the SBS News website
Reported by Sarah Abo
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Doctors have been shocked by the survival of a young footballer who contracted a rare and deadly muscle-attacking bacteria.

A Victorian man is one of just seven people who have survived a rare superbug that’s believed to have struck only 21 people in the world.

Sam O’Sullivan not only defied those odds, but it’s also believed he is the only survivor to have escaped losing a limb after being infected with necrotising myositis – a fast-spreading infection that attacks the body’s muscles.

Mr O'Sullivan said he had flu-like symptoms for about a week, which culminated in being hospitalised for severe shin pain.

“They couldn’t really find out what was going on for another couple of days,” he told 3AW radio.

“My leg blew up and my foot stopped working. I lost sensation.”

He went into surgery for compartment syndrome, but it wasn’t until doctors had made an incision that they realised what they were dealing with.

“They opened my leg up and got the shock of their lives.”