Cooper Henson returns to the side after overcoming a calf injury, Izaac Johnson and Jed Hill also return from injury while North Ballarat City’s Issac Pertzel comes into the side as the 23^rd player.

The clash with the third-placed Bushrangers at Ikon Park on Sunday will be GWV’s third successive week of taking on a top three opponent.

It has been competitive for periods within those matches but its third quarters have been far from acceptable. Two costly lapses have equated to a -76-point differential across its last two third quarters – an area coach Gerard FitzGerald has focused on during the week.

FitzGerald said it would be interesting to see the group’s response after an intense week on the training track as it looks to find consistency within matches.

“We’ve certainly trained with a bit more ferocity and intensity,” FitzGerald said.

“What we delivered in the third quarter was far from good enough and that’s a couple of times now where we’ve repeated that sort of performance in the third quarter. It will be good to see how we deal with that, whether we got back into our shells.

“I said just forget about looking ahead, just go and attack each quarter, not each game, each quarter like you want to win the quarter.

“If we can break it down, when we get that right we have good quarters. We’ve just got to show that level of resilience and take responsibility for our performance on a quarter-by-quarter basis.”

FitzGerald said one method to help his young charges was to provide them with key focus areas when they start to drift out of a match. The experienced coach believing a team drop-off begins when individuals fall off the pace, he was hopeful of a four-quarter performance from his group this weekend.

“When a team drops off, it’s the individuals dropping off, it’s not the team.

“So you go back to which individuals are disappearing out of the game and give them strategies within their role.

“What can they do about it. Give them some factors that they can control to get back in the game...then all of a sudden momentum’s come back again.”

The Rebels sit tenth on the ladder, six points off the eighth-placed Gippsland.