The first 200 — an AFLW milestone
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Saturday's North Melbourne v Fremantle AFLW game at Arden Street was thriller, with the result in doubt until the final seconds, and a finals place on the line for the home side. The Roos hung on to win by a point in a match that was relatively low scoring, but still had bursts of the free-flowing play that is becoming more of the norm than the exception in a league now in its fifth season. It was a fitting way to mark the 200th match of the still very young AFL Women's competition.
I wrote about the first 100 games of the competition for the Footy Almanac in the early stages of 2020. It had taken until the fourth season to reach that milestone but with the league having expanded to 14 teams and the length of the season extended, the tally has been doubled in just over a year.
The AFL Women's competition has not been without its concerns during its short five years, not least the fact that the fourth season was shut down without a premiership team being declared, a result of the COVID-19 outbreak that reached our shores early last year. The ill-conceived conference system was also the subject of much frustration and criticism. Happily it has now been dispensed with.
And of course, in its infancy, particularly in the first season, the congested style of game and the very low scores made the AFLW an easy target for criticism, whether from those whose only aim appeared to be to see the competition fail, or out of genuine concern for the future of the league.
Some of those criticisms were entirely valid, and the coaches, players and the league itself have taken most of those constructively. This has helped the competition take giant strides in just four years. The average team score rose steadily over the first three seasons before falling back in 2020, but has regained much of the "lost ground" in 2021. The 2020 "blip" is understandable when allowing for the fact that four new sides joined the league for that season, on top of two new teams a year earlier.
An expansion from eight to 14 teams in just two seasons is huge by historical comparison with the men's V/AFL competition. Both the men's (1897) and women's (2017) competitions began with eight teams, but it was not until its 12th season the VFL expanded to 10 clubs. The AFLW competition did so in its third season. The VFL was 28 years old before it ramped up to a 12-team competition, and 90 years old when it finally expanded to 14 teams. The AFL Women's competition has made that transition in just five seasons.
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Numbers, of course, can be used to identify trends, but just as easily to skew or magnify perceptions. It would be narrow-minded to use them solely as a means to judge the progress made by the AFLW since its inception. In recent years the men's AFL competition has been the subject of criticism not just from a perspective of a drop in scores but also the "look of the game".
This "look", of course, is highly subjective and largely intangible, but that has not stopped debate raging for the past decade or so. There are those who yearn for the higher-scoring free-flowing football of the 1990s, while others (often younger fans, such as my sons) who delight in the machinations of team defence that mean goals come only at a premium.
Opinion on the recent progress of the men's game has been divided. But that does not appear to be the case for AFL Women's. From a pure "look of the game" perspective, there would be very few, if any, football watchers who would deny that the standard and "watchability" of the AFLW games has improved exponentially in just four years.
After the first season of the competition, I had expected that to be so. But from seasons two to four I began to wonder if progress might be a bit slower, given the rapid expansion of the league, and also because, to my eye, there seemed to be a lack of "touch" in some players that I suspected resulted from not having played the game in their formative years.
But now, in the AFLW's fifth season, women who have played the game throughout their teenage years are beginning to come through. This year's number one draft pick, Ellie McKenzie, is a perfect example. When the first AFL Women's match was played on February 3, 2017, McKenzie was 14 years old, an age at which most girls in times past would have been advised, or even forced, to give the game away.
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Instead, McKenzie and others of her age were now being identified as "pathway talent". Four years on and Ellie and other such as the Bulldogs' Jess Fitzgerald look like footballers who have grown up playing the game. Over the next few years we will see so many more Ellie McKenzies and Jess Fitzgeralds — players whose kicking actions and marking techniques are as pure as we've seen — take the field. (That is not to denigrate those current women who may have awkward looking kicking styles. Their achievements in the AFLW are as impressive, if not more so, because they were not given the opportunity to play the game in their teenage years.)
In my article last year I expressed a feeling of gratitude at being given the opportunity of seeing an elite football league grow from almost nothing, as I would love to have seen with the VFA and VFL men's competitions. With another 100 games under its belt, the AFLW is blossoming, and it is an absolute privilege to see that happen — particularly as a man who for much of my life was ignorant to the fact that women had been denied such an opportunity by societal attitudes for more than a century.
To footy fans who have not yet been swept up by the AFL Women's juggernaut I say, jump on board the AFLW bandwagon. You are in for the ride of your life.
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