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In the wake of the AFL’s extraordinary memo telling AFLW coaches to loosen up their coaching style, several things spring to mind.
It was the AFL’s decision to bring the AFLW’s commencement forward by three years. They were warned that the talent pool was not deep, but the AFL decided that commencing the league early would be the best thing to accelerate the recruiting of new players to the game.
In this, they’ve been proven spectacularly correct, as the explosion in female participation around the country since the AFLW’s opening season has demonstrated.
But having made that mostly-positive call, the AFL must now live with the short-term consequences — a game where, in the first season at least, barely ten percent of the players could qualify as elite.
This season that ten percent has grown considerably, but still many of the new players are in the infancy of their footballing careers, and will only become truly elite with playing time and experience.
The fact that they’re playing only seven elite-level games per season isn’t helping, as it’s not easy for players to achieve elite standards playing most of the year in non-elite state competitions.
As Bulldogs coach Paul Groves said in his Round 1 post-match press conference, the easiest thing for athletes new to the game to pick up is defensive pressure.
Therefore the AFLW, in its second year, is a league full of fit, well-coached athletes whose excellent pressure defence is executed, on average, at a higher level than their ball handling.
Predictably, this is leading to some games where the high-pressure tackling and congestion tactics of competitive football is killing the spectacle.
The only way to fix this properly is to let the game, and its players, evolve in skills and standard.
Because for all the media focus on the one bad game of the round — between Collingwood and Carlton — the standard of the other three games ranged from okay to excellent, with the Melbourne vs GWS game being a genuine cracker.
Yes the Dockers failed to score in their first half, but the Dogs made up for it (unless you’re a Dockers fan) by putting on an entertaining show, and while the match wasn’t close, it was far from dull.
Already we’re seeing the emergence of players who, in combination with similar players, can break through congested play, like Chloe Molloy with her tackle-busting power, or Izzy Huntington and Monique Conti with their dancing footwork.
Collingwood and Carlton made an ugly game not primarily because of their coaches, but because they’ve got the two worst midfields in the competition, with very few elite skills on display.
(Photo by Michael Dodge/Getty Images)
Instead of trying to ‘fix’ everything with a new rule or ten, in typical AFL style, the AFL needs to accept that any thinness of ball handling talent is a natural consequence of their decision to start the league early, and give it time to improve.
Instead, they’ve given a gift to the negative publicity hounds in the media and public who’d love nothing more than to see the league struggle, and have reacted solely to the one bad game of the weekend while ignoring the other three, attempting to impose a sledge-hammer fix on a problem that may not actually exist.
This faintly hysterical overreaction could make a person wonder if a) any matches that don’t involve Collingwood and Carlton actually matter in AFL HQ, and b) if any of the AFL’s top people actually watched any games that were not televised on Channel Seven.
It also smells disturbingly of buck-passing, with the AFL attempting to blame coaches, whose careers depend on winning games, for a perceived lack of spectacle that is entirely the AFL’s own fault.
Even more disturbingly, it suggests that the AFL lacks faith in the ability of female players to evolve in standard and eventually fix the problem themselves, which is not a good look for a competition that proclaims to be the high watermark in respecting female athletes.
It demonstrates a just-as-disturbing lack of patience, when patience was always going to be the number one requirement from the people managing the game, particularly once they’ve made the decision to ignore advice and start the league early.
Or maybe they’ve looked at the six-team expansion over the next two seasons that they’ve also committed to, further diluting the talent pool just when it needs to strengthen, and realised that it means they’ll be stuck with this problem for a long time yet.
Someone’s going to be blamed for it, and it can’t be them, so they’ll make it the coaches’ fault.
At this point, actual football people need to tell the managers and fixers in AFL HQ to get a grip. They can’t impose their spread-sheet and pie-chart reality onto every aspect of the world’s best and toughest game, and attempting to do so may end up damaging the new competition’s credibility just when it needs it most.
In addition to his interest in sport, Joel Shepherd is a professional Science Fiction author. You can read more by him here.