After plenty of speculation following the trade period and draft, Round 1 of AFLW gave us something concrete to look at in terms of how each team has changed and looks positioned for 2018.

Carlton Blues vs Collingwood Magpies

I was pretty down on both of these teams going into season two, and the game on Friday night did nothing to change my mind.

Collingwood’s midfield are just as mediocre as predicted — they have some nice athletes in Christina Bernardi, Brittany Bonicci, Caitlyn Edwards and Melissa Kuys who between them had barely a single one-touch possession all night.

Dropped chest marks, fumbled pickup… these are the things that most AFLW teams spent the off-season improving with draft picks and trades, but not Collingwood.

In a competition where you’ve got one second to cleanly pick up the ball, Collingwood’s mids take two. Jaimee Lambert is the exception, but she was fairly quiet all night.

But they were still better than Carlton’s mids, who were perhaps a little cleaner, and have some hypothetically better players like Katie Loynes and Nicola Stevens (when she was playing through the middle) but still managed to get far less of the ball overall.

Carlton won the game, but getting beaten by Collingwood’s midfield is a pretty awful stat that few teams this season will want to repeat.

And if that indicates Carlton’s midfield level for the season, they’ve got no chance at the final, let alone the flag.

On the positive side for Carlton, Tayla Harris was strong, and showed why Carlton made such an effort to get her, though her service was limited, predictably, by the fact that her mids rarely had the ball.

The Blues defence was outstanding, repelling repeated Collingwood entries, with Gab Pound putting up her hand for recognition above the ordinary.

Bri Davey was a little quiet despite her 15 possessions, but Davey is best when she can spread and run, and she had so little of that on Friday it looked like she was playing in a phone booth for much of the night.

Did Wayne Siekman make the right call putting Chloe Molloy in the backline? She was probably best on ground for the Pies, and if she’d been elsewhere the Blues might have scored a lot more… but Collingwood desperately needed goals, and their much-vaunted forward line was practically invisible this game.

Jasmine Garner is great when she’s taking marks on a lead, but with this midfield that’s not going to happen much. Caught in close quarters, she couldn’t break tackles.

If there’s one thing Chloe Molloy excels at (and there’s many) it’s breaking tackles — she’s physically a level above most of the players out there, even at 19.

If all the service the Pies forwards can expect is yet another bomb dropping on their heads while surrounded by Carlton defenders, surely you put your one forward who can scrap and fight and bust through tackles up in the forward line where she can knock people over and kick goals?

The biggest upside for the Pies coming out of that game is that they’re going to get some very high draft picks next year.

With any luck they’ll spend them on midfielders. On the other hand, it’s an expansion year, so a lot of the best picks will already be gone.

Melbourne Demons vs GWS Giants

So I was dead wrong about GWS’s chances this season — they lost this game, but there’s no chance they’ll win the wooden spoon.

The Giants have recruited wonderfully, and even with Emma Swanson not playing, and both Rene Forth and Jess Dal Pos quiet, they had plenty of grunt and skill around the ball, often in unexpected forms — like Britt Tully and Courtney Gum.

Gum is a revelation. Thirty-five years old and only just now motivated to put in the hard work to reach her maximum level, she led her team with 17 possessions and zero brain-fades — an advantage the Giants might have over the rest of the competition, with so many experienced recruits in a league full of kids and rookies.

Erin McKinnon was not only excellent in ruck but showed serious speed with the ball, Phoebe McWilliams showed signs of becoming one of the competition’s better forwards with three goals, and both youngster Rebecca Beeson, and Captain Amanda Farrugia, were excellent.

And of course, Cora Staunton, with all her ridiculous experience playing every football code known to humankind, was dangerous up forward, and will create genuine matchup problems for any opposition team due to her combination of power, speed and cool under pressure.

But the Demons were a better team by more than just the narrow margin suggested by the score. They were making the play more often and controlling the ball better, though there remains some suggestion that they haven’t yet found the perfect balance between possession handballing, and long kicking.

The Giants clung to them like a wheel-lock on an illegally parked car, and never let them get into gear, with Daisy Pierce coming in for particularly close attention.

It’s a credit to the Giants that they held Melbourne so close for so long, but you got the impression watching that the outcome was more about whether Melbourne could find the key to undo the lock rather than anything the Giants might do.

And the difference, in the end, was raw athleticism — the one thing that even stifling team defence can’t always contain.

It came in the form of Rocky Cranston, who has physically transformed herself into a genuine raging bull of the competition, strong and fast and skillful to boot, with three goals in the second half, an outrageous one-handed pickup at full sprint, and sheer pace that the Giants’ defenders could not match.

Aliesha Newman and Cat Phillips showed that they’ve evolved from being just runners into actual footballers, and in the second half at least, Daisy Pearce slipped her leash and showed she’s not just a brilliant football brain, but a serious athlete as well.

And finally, Tegan Cunningham is going to be a star — at 6-1 she’s tall for the current AFLW, but plays and moves like a smart, nimble 5-9 or smaller.

She had several score involvements in addition to her single goal, and did some other things that promise to turn her into the kind of player that gives opposition coaches nightmares, because they know they have no one who can possibly match up on her.

The Dees may have only just scraped by with the win, but they remain the team to beat in 2018.

Adelaide Crows vs Brisbane Lions

Some Victorians apparently still don’t rate Brisbane, despite being shellacked by them on most occasions last year. Well, Brisbane’s just beaten the defending champions at home… but I guess that won’t bother the Victorians, who apparently don’t rate Adelaide either, despite them, you know, winning the flag and all that.

On the strength of this game, you have to question whether Adelaide can win the flag again. As I’ve written before, Adelaide’s Bec Goddard loves to move the ball quickly at the expense of maintaining possession. The question was always going to be how long it would take until ‘proper football’ (possession football) reasserted itself as the dominant form.

Well, in this game, Brisbane dominated uncontested possessions, total possessions, inside fifties and marks inside fifty, and also scoring shots, 11 to 4. If the Lions had been more accurate in front of goal, it wouldn’t have even been close.

The sheer volume of Adelaide’s turnovers was horrendous, and Brisbane were wise to their propensity to kick it forward at all costs, and had multiple defenders waiting each time.

Sarah Perkins barely touched the ball all game, a combination of getting smothered by Leah Kaslar, and also that Adelaide never maintained possession long enough to set up an accurate pass. If Adelaide keep playing this way, they’ll have to install bomb shelters at Norwood.

Sure, Erin Phillips wasn’t playing, and would have helped enormously… but I think the tide is beginning to turn against Bec Goddard’s bombardier approach to coaching.

That’s not to say that aggressive, long-kicking football won’t be the norm — Goddard introduced it, and now everyone’s adopted it.

But there are degrees to these things, and the Crows version is currently the most extreme, inaccurate and costly — everyone’s ready for it now, and its audacity surprises no one. If the Crows had actually bothered to slow down and hit a target all game, they might have won.

As for Brisbane, their backline can take a bow, led by Leah Kaslar, Jamie Stanton and Breanna Koenen — no Sam Virgo this season but they still look like a brick wall.

You almost got the feeling they were enjoying Adelaide’s approach, and welcomed each long bomb as another chance to pad their stats.

Young defender Arianna Clarke is in some terrific company to learn how to ply her trade, and I’m sure she learned a lot on Saturday.

Sabrina Frederick-Traub is a beast of a contested mark, and the rest of them were as tough and swarming in their pressure as last year.

Special mention to Alexandra Anderson, 14 possessions and 12 tackles — Brisbane needed another midfielder to step forward and help the reliable Bates and Zielke, and Anderson did so.

Will it be enough for the flag this year? I’ll want to see how they go against a more conventional team before answering. Next weekend at home against the Bulldogs might tell the tale.

Western Bulldogs vs Fremantle Dockers

It’s hard to know what to make of the Dockers from their first game of the season. Like Luke Skywalker at the end of a certain summer movie, they were kind of there, but really not.

So let’s talk about the Dogs instead. In the first half, they were kind of terrifying… though again, Bulldogs fans should temper that excitement by reminding themselves that their opposition were just a collective astral projection, and hadn’t actually left Perth.

Short, accurate kicking now appears to be the Bulldogs mantra, and anyone doubting that the AFLW’s basic skills have improved in season two was proven dramatically wrong in this match.

Up by the sticks, Katie Brennan is simply the best female forward in the game, with daylight second. Izzy Huntington didn’t score, but showed signs of serious athleticism, skills and smarts.

For the Dogs, this could be the beginning of a great double act, with Brennan demanding so much defensive attention that Huntington gets lots of space to run free.

The rest of the forward line seems mostly composed of an endless rotation of quick mids, though Ellie Blackburn spent enough time there to qualify as a regular, and Monique Conti played much of the first half as a forward pocket.

Things got interesting in the third quarter, when the Dockers, with the wind behind them, decided that they were not in fact figments of their own collective imagination, and materialised into real flesh-and-blood footballers.

With serious pressure on the ballcarriers, the Dogs began to lose at the stoppages, and their short kicks began to break down for the same reason they always break down in the AFLW — not every link in the chain is as strong as every other link, and if you have to kick too often under pressure, someone will eventually fluff one and turn it over.

As deep as the Dogs’ midfield is, some of their midfielders are made of different stuff than others. It didn’t show in the first half, but with the third quarter came pressure, and under pressure wood cracks while steel doesn’t.

With Ellie Blackburn and Monique Conti up forward, and Jenna Bruton quiet in her first step up from VFL level, the Dogs’ mids struggled to win the ball and all the momentum swung to the Dockers.

This was rectified in the last quarter by the favourable breeze, and by more of the Dogs’ best mids moving to the middle — Conti in particular looked far more comfortable in the middle than up forward, though it’s understandable she would be eased into the AFLW gently.

The point being that the Dogs appear to be relying on midfield depth to make their forward line work, but if their midfield contains no actual star midfielders when they’re most needed, they could run into trouble real fast against the teams who apply serious pressure through the middle – like the Brisbane Lions, who they play next week. For me, that’s game of the round.

I know I’ve talked mostly about the Dogs, but it’s hard to analyse a team that wasn’t really there. However, the Dockers showed in the third quarter that they’re much better than the first half indicated — they’ve got some serious speed through the middle with Dana Hooker, Hayley Miller, Ebony Antonio, Evangeline Gooch, Stephanie Cain and others.

But they need to be much more accountable going the other way, and learn that in this competition, hard pressure defence at all times is not optional.

They play Collingwood next week, in front of what will likely be a record crowd for a women’s football match, and I’m expecting them to bounce back hard.

And given their ordinary performance on Friday, Collingwood are exactly the team to do it to, with 50,000 screaming sandgropers urging the Dockers on.

In addition to his interest in sport, Joel Shepherd is a professional Science Fiction author. You can read more by him here.