article originally published by South Gippsland Sentinel Times on Tuesday September 4th, 2018.

After 135 years, the name ‘Alberton’ may be lost forever from the Victoria country football lexicon and the last man standing, Barry Stride, could do little else last Saturday than welcome the changes in the AFL Gippsland Leagues and Competitions Review Draft Recommendations Report released last Friday.
Chief among the changes is that Alberton will merge with Mid Gippsland next year, minus Yarragon, to form a 15 team Central and Southern Gippsland competition. Clubs and leagues have until Friday, September 14, 2018 to respond.
Speaking after the Alberton league’s final showpiece event last Saturday, grand final day at Meeniyan, the president of the Alberton league welcomed the changes as “a great positive”.

Our preference would have been for two clubs to come across and join us but we have been made aware that the AFL Gippsland Commission went to see all the clubs that might be likely to come and they didn‘t want to come. And as we have seen before, clubs effectively can’t be forced to move.

All they would do is protest. So this is the next best thing and at least this way, we get to keep all our existing clubs together.

I’ve spoken to all the clubs today and broadly they’ve accepted it as a good result.

Of course there are jumper clash issues to be sorted out and we have concerns about the junior football age groups and also the loss of the Under 13 netball.

There’s no issue with not having Under 11s netball but the Under 13s is where the clubs like to build their numbers and start their coaching and we‘d prefer to have 15 1/2 and 17 1/2 as the junior age groups in the football.

The clubs feel there’s too big a jump between Under 16 and Under 18.

Barry Stride - Alberton FNL President

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