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“A historic night for women’s sport,” said the Fox Sports voice over when reporting on the first AFL Women’s league match between Carlton and Collingwood on Friday night.
It’s great that women’s sport has garnered mainstream attention and a big crowd to Ikon Park, but the only ‘history’ the AFL have created is a moment in which they highlighted how far behind they are compared to most other sports when it comes to women.
With a gigantic media push powered by almost 12 months of promotion by the AFL’s marketing machine running in its highest gear there was no way Friday’s game wasn’t going to attract huge interest. It was great for the competitors, and there’s no doubt the AFL is the envy of sports worldwide when it comes to harnessing the passion of its huge fan base.
However, the hubris that has come with the AFLW would have you believe the AFL invented women’s sport and that Friday night was akin to putting an astronaut on Mars. To put it into perspective, basketball, football, rugby league, rugby union, cricket, surfing, surf lifesaving, mixed martial arts and boxing have had either women’s leagues or high-profile female competitors for years or decades.
Basketball, probably the only sport in the aforementioned list that has always had a history of women’s participation, has had a national women’s league in Australia since 1981. The Australian Women’s Sevens rugby team are Olympic gold medallists.
In football the W-League has been running for a decade, the Australian Women’s Soccer Association was established in 1974 and an Australian women’s team competed that year in the Asian Championships.
The Women’s Rugby League has been operating since 1995. The Women’s Big Bash League is a relatively recent arrival on the cricket calendar, but it replaced the Women’s National Cricket League, which began in 2007.
And I’ve only named a few.
Individually Australian women have dominated world surfing titles since South African-born Wendy Botha won the world crown in 1989. Since 2000, Australian women have won 13 of 16 contested World Surf League titles. In surf life saving the Ironwoman event has been contested since 1992.
Whichever way you view it the AFL are highlighting by their own self-promotion just how slow they have been in embracing female competitors in comparison to other sports.
The blanket media blitz will make stars of many of the women who are pioneering the competition, and that should be applauded because women’s sport still, despite the examples listed, lags far behind their male counterparts in coverage, pay, funding and facilities. There will be big crowds and ratings because the AFL does this better than anyone and will back an idea to the hilt once they’ve embraced it. From now until the AFLW final on 25 March they will make sure the women are front and centre as their marketing machine cranks into action.
Just don’t tell us they’re creating history for women’s sport. They have decades of catching up to do.
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