It has been a frustrating time for the association’s top team.

After dominating the first half of the season, entering the Christmas break on top of the ladder, Rovers United Bruck’s A grade side has played just one game in 2026, due to the quirks of the fixture and inclement conditions across the region.

After their first match back from the mid-season break was cancelled due to the January bushfires across Victoria, the Hawks had a nice win over Benalla on 17 January.

But since then, they haven’t played a single game.

The league forwent playing matches on Australia Day weekend, and after the following week’s play was cancelled due to heat, and Rovers United Bruck sat out with their bye, suddenly it’s been almost a month since they’ve even played a match.

“We’ve played one game of cricket since 13 December, ‘frustrating’ is one word for it – you can’t control it,” RUB skipper Jeremy Wilson said.

“We’ve never had the last week before Christmas off before, we’ve never had Australia Day weekend off before from an A grade point of view, so there are two weekends you’re just used to playing cricket.

“If we had played those weekends, we would’ve had some continuity, but to have those weekends off and with some fires around and some very warm weather, it’s been hard.

“It’s almost been like a reset, like a mini preseason.

“We’ve still been training and that, but as far as your game-day intensity, it just hasn’t been there - that’s going to be one of the challenges we face this week.”

Lining up across from the Hawks in their return to cricket will be an extremely tough opponent in Yarrawonga Mulwala.

The Lakers have always been a challenging squad to put down, thanks to their batting depth, class with the ball, and sheer bloody-minded determination to win at all costs.

Handy batters Fraser Smart (181 runs @ 36.20) and Devlin Webb (180 @ 36) provide stability and power at the top of the order, while their bowling attack is spearheaded by Angus Heslin (13 wickets @ 12.62) and Webb (11 @ 18.55).

Indeed, it will be a day for the batters to step up - the last time these two sides faced off against each other back in October, the Lakers were rolled for 76 runs, with the match completed in a touch over 50 overs.

“We’ve got a really tough game on Saturday against Yarra – arguably them and Wang Maggies are probably the two in-form teams of the competition,” Wilson said.

“We still know our best is good enough, and we expect to win every game we play, so it’s not like we’re going to go in there wondering how we’re going to win, we know how we’re going to win it, it’s a matter of executing our plans.

“We’re under no illusions they’ve got a well-balanced team, they made 243 last week, so as far as their batting’s concerned they bat right down, and their bowling has always been strong.

“It’s just a matter of us executing our plans with bat and ball and trying to get another win.

“From our point of view, if we win two more games, we’re most likely going to finish top of the ladder.

“We want to win them all but we’ve set ourselves up to have a really strong crack at it.”

Wilson said the playing XI would be relatively set now the festivities of the pre-Christmas period have died down.

“The side will be very similar, the side generally won’t change much for the rest of the year – there might be one to two unavailabilities, but you don’t often see many changes to sides post-Christmas,” he said.

“Wedding season’s over, racing season’s over, Christmas parties have come and gone, so there’s not a lot of reasons for blokes to miss.”

The Hawks resume their campaign after a month of no cricket this Saturday from 12.30pm at Yarrawonga’s Stan Hargreaves Oval – we’ll have to wait and see if there’s any rust.