AFLW Evolution: Who's top of the food chain, and who's going extinct

Mark this round down in your diaries, for Round 3 of the 2019 AFLW season was probably the best and certainly the most consequential played in women’s football so far.

How can this be so? Given that it proved that the conference systems stinks, and literally every game ended in a blowout?

Well, this was the round where exciting, attacking footy beat ugly defensive footy in every single game.

If this is indicative of what’s to come in the AFLW, the future for women’s football is bright indeed.

The women’s skills are improving, and as multiple victorious coaches said in the post-game interviews, when that happens you’re no longer limited to just coaching basic skills, you can start building a structure of play.

Coaches tried to do this in 2017 before realising the skill level wasn’t there, and instead the first premiership was won by Bec Goddard’s Crows, playing perhaps the most simple, least-skilful gameplan imaginable.

In 2018 Paul Groves’ Bulldogs stepped it up a level of complexity, playing a short-kicking, possession-intensive game that didn’t deliberately turn the ball over, but instead manoeuvred the ball up the ground with a degree of control.

But now in 2019, something else is emerging — teams with gameplans that are far more open, relying on the higher skills of players to win individual contests without needing another five teammates as backup, in turn freeing up players to spread forward and wide to facilitate high-speed ball movement from one end to the other.

Now that the teams are starting to settle into the season, the impact is becoming quite noticeable on the scoreboard, with a massively increased average score, from the top teams at least.

And better yet, the teams that are not playing this style are starting to get flogged.

Yes, there weren’t any close games this weekend, and the AFL HQ might be unhappy about that, but they shouldn’t be.

Finally the AFLW is developing into a competition where teams simply must be aggressive and kick lots of goals to win.

Just flooding the defence isn’t an option, and teams relying on that are getting badly beaten as they discover that you can’t just have a strategy of forcing your opponent to play badly, you have to plan to play well yourself.

And once badly behind on the scoreboard, those defensive teams have no plan B — needing to score rapidly to get back in the game, they may as well just give up, not having that tool in their toolbox.

Five teams and coaches appear to be leading this stylistic change — Scott Gowans’ Kangaroos, Trent Cooper’s Dockers, Mick Stinear’s Demons, Mathew Clarke’s Crows and Daniel Harford’s Blues.

Sadly for the planners in AFL HQ, all of these teams save Carlton are in the same conference.

Paul Hood would probably like to be playing this style of footy, but particularly after Nina Morrison went down, he simply lacks the personnel to pull it off.

I reckon this is the most significant and exciting development in the AFLW so far, and all fans of women’s footy should be cheering for it to continue. Bring on more blow-outs, I love ‘em.

North Melbourne Kangaroos vs Western Bulldogs

Paul Groves is discovering that having the winning strategy from last year can be a curse.

It’s like falling in love with your current model iPhone — you refuse to upgrade it when the better ones come out.

But at the speed things are evolving in the AFLW, a year’s football is probably the equivalent to two evolutions of iPhone, not one. Right now the Dogs are playing iPhone 4 football in an iPhone 6 world.

Their short chipping has become predictable, and the athletic Roos knew exactly how to zone up to cut off those short passes.

Worse, the Roos simply allowed the Dogs to get superior numbers to the contests, which Ellie Blackburn and Kirsty Lamb did well to help win for the Dogs 25 to 21.

Scott Gowans admitted in the post-game presser that he was willing to concede clearances to the Dogs. Getting lots of numbers around the ball is yesterday’s tactic — the Kangaroos wanted to win on the outside.

The Dogs just don’t have enough ways to move the ball. Deprived of their short chipping, they had no choice but to kick long to contests, and from the resulting turnovers the Kangaroos have so many ways to move the ball.

They kick short, they kick long, they handball, they run in support, they spread wide and back their pace.

Jenna Bruton, Jamie Stanton and Emma Kearney were dominant in the midfield, but their backs and forwards all have nice skills too and are endlessly attacking, playing on confidently but not recklessly and getting the ball into their forward line before the Dogs’ defenders were ready.

The Bulldogs, by contrast, just move the ball far too slowly, lack that overlapping run from their halfbacks, and so when they did get kick it inside 50, North Melbourne’s defenders (and often midfielders too) were already back and waiting.

Debutant Courteney Munn was the greatest beneficiary of North’s fast ball movement in this game with four goals, but the point of this style of football is that it could be anyone’s day in the forward line.

The forwards know this, and look excited and optimistic as a result — a scary prospect given North’s forward targets include Jasmine Garner, Kaitlyn Ashmore, Mo Hope and sometimes Emma King and Jess Duffin.

The Bulldogs have the personnel to play better than this game suggested, but right now their ball movement patterns are yesterday’s news, I doubt they’ll do better against the others of the big-five ball movers.

They’ll likely beat Brisbane next week, but after that they get Fremantle, Melbourne and Carlton, all of whom will beat them comfortably if this weekend’s form is continued.

Courteney Munn (centre) celebrates kicking four goals on debut(Photo by Graham Denholm/Getty Images)

Carlton Blues vs Greater Western Sydney

This excellent game of football was brought to you by Dan Harford.

Carlton’s ball movement, at its best, is end-to-end and top notch. It was far too much for GWS, who again looked slow, and being a defensively-minded team rarely had the options upfield that Carlton did.

Harford’s vision for this team is exciting, and I’m happy to say this is one thing I did get right in my season preview.

It’s not just Maddie Prespakis, it’s the extra speed in the middle with Chloe Dalton and Georgia Gee, combined with Millie Mullane, Katie Loynes and Jess Edwards.

All of them are quick, and they move the ball on rapidly, and with increasing accuracy each week.

That in turn opened the forward line up for Harris and Vescio, and for a while it looked as though Vescio would be the one to break out.

But no, it was Tayla Harris reminding everyone that despite a lacklustre AFLW career so far after so much hype, there’s not really much any forward can do if her mids aren’t getting her the ball.

In this game she played like a starving crocodile charging a leg of lamb — finally she was getting decent delivery, particularly from Prespakis, and she was hungry and spectacular, finishing with three goals.

And as for Maddie Prespakis, she’s probably even better than I thought she’d be. It’s not just her clean hands, neat skills and insatiable work ethic, it’s her football awareness.

Some players just know where to run, and can anticipate events to put themselves in the right spot at the right time.

Slightly ridiculous though it may seem, in only her third game, Prespakis is probably not only Carlton’s best player, but their smartest too.

As for GWS, they’re just slow. There’s precious little urgency moving the ball up the ground compared to Carlton, and while the Blues frequently tore through the middle of the ground, most of the Giants’ space was only presented to them by the Blues’ open structure rather than anything they did themselves.

When they did get it forward, their big three of Cora Staunton, Yvonne Bonner and Christina Bernardi were terrific, but the keyword here is ‘when’. Last year it was Carlton’s forwards starving for service, this year it’s GWS’s.

Carlton may just be the shining light in Conference B. The two matches they lost were to North Melbourne and Adelaide, both excellent teams, and Carlton were beating the Crows for much of that match.

They’ve improved match-by-match more rapidly than any other team in the competition, they’ve found unexpected midfield depth to assist Prespakis, their backline not only defends but rebounds the ball well, and Tayla Harris just had the best game of her career.

Best of all, Carlton’s next four games are against Geelong, Collingwood, Brisbane and the Bulldogs, all games that based on recent form, Carlton should win with varying degrees of comfort. Don’t write the Blues off yet.

Tayla Harris celebrates with Madison Prespakis (Photo by Brett Hemmings/Getty Images)

Collingwood Magpies vs Fremantle Dockers

This will be Wayne Siekman’s last season as coach of the Collingwood women’s team. The team is nowhere near this bad, and contains a lot of really good players – but this is women’s football coaching at its worst.

Collingwood’s game is built about having numbers around the ball. They do this very well, winning lots of contested possession and making it hard for their opponents to move the ball effectively.

But it also means that when they try to spread the ball wide and run, there’s no targets to kick to.

It means that when kicking against a strong wind, as they were in this game, they’ll stack so many players in their defensive 50 that when they kick the ball out, it just hits an opponent on the chest and gets put back in again.

Worse still, all this congestion, lack of forward targets, and lack of run and spread from the contests, means the young Collingwood players get no clear air in which to use their skills.

The Dockers gameplan is about creating space, running hard into areas where their opponents aren’t.

The Pies often end up piled in around the contest like sardines in a can, where using the ball effectively becomes like trying to play footy in the Tokyo subway at rush hour.

No surprise then that their skills break down, their kids have no confidence, and their matches become exceptionally ugly and low scoring.

Yes they looked better after halftime, mostly because they were well behind on the scoreboard and had no choice but to kick long and be aggressive.

Their players are much better than any of their first three games would indicate — for proof of this you just need to look at the relatively poor skills of the Dockers in this game, or of the Demons the weekend before, or Geelong the weekend before that.

The Pies’ style of game makes everyone play badly, and gives women’s football a bad reputation.

When watching the mess it’s made of the games of great kids like Jordyn Allen and Katie Lynch, the whole thing becomes especially sad.

When you look at the great seasons being had by all the kids at Geelong, or Maddy Prespakis at Carlton, or Sabreena Duffy at Fremantle, you just have to be thankful that they went to a coaching system that allows them to play open, skilful footy.

None of that this year for the Collingwood girls. Maybe next year, once the appropriate coaching changes have been made.

As for Fremantle, they had to battle the inevitable skill errors that come with playing Collingwood, a team that would rather make their opponent play badly than try to play well themselves.

This season it’s about the only thing Collingwood’s good at, and Freo played some pretty ugly football too, thanks to the crush of black-and-white bodies around the ball.

But still the Dockers backed their pace and ran through the corridor, and once significantly behind on the scoreboard, the Pies were left with no choice but to attack, but didn’t know how.

The Dockers’ midfield dominance is best summed up by the fact that they lost the hitouts 36 to 14, but won clearances 17 to 27 anyway.

Fremantle are already 3-and-zip, and they have an easier run home than some, facing the Crows, Bulldogs, Cats and Roos.

Cats and Dogs they should beat, and if they only split the other two, that leaves them 6-and-1 for the season.

Collingwood AFLW coach Wayne Siekman (Photo by Adam Trafford/AFL Media/Getty Images)

Adelaide Crows vs Geelong Cats

Even with Nina Morrison, Geelong would have struggled to match the depth of the Crows. Without her, they were severely overmatched.

I get the feeling that Paul Hood would like his team to transition fast and play aggressively, but he simply doesn’t have the personnel.

It’s not anyone’s fault and I think the Cats will be fine over the next couple of seasons — they’ve got a lock on their development region in a way most teams don’t, and have lots of great young talent already in the team, and more still to come.

But it’s going to take them another year or two to acquire the depth needed to be a threat to a team like the Crows.

Adelaide dominated in every department, and Geelong’s scoreline was perhaps a little flattering, scoring 6.1 primarily because the Crows defenders were all up high, allowing the Cats to sometimes get out the back into an empty forward line.

But in the meantime, Adelaide poured on 10.6, and the Cats were never a realistic chance. It also demonstrates exactly the kind of thing we can expect to see a lot more of from this new generation of ball-moving teams — games where coaches are prepared to concede goals in order to score even more themselves.

As opposed to the old-style defensive teams, whose coaches spend much of their players’ energy trying to stop their opponent from doing something good, at the expense of doing something good themselves.

A look across Adelaide’s best demonstrates the problem for their opponents this year — Ebony Marinoff, Erin Phillips and Chelsea Randall aren’t a surprise (though Marinoff’s 33 disposals is an AFLW record) but Anne Hatchard continued her amazing improvement with 27 touches, while ruck Jess Foley was tremendous with 18 touches and 19 hit outs, Justine Mules put her hand up again with 15, and teenage star-in-the-making Chloe Scheer had two goals.

If you’re playing against them, who do you tag? Phillips is nearly impossible, because she wanders forward and back, forcing a midfield tagger to defend in the goal square and a genuine defender to play midfield.

Opponents might switch on her depending on where she’s playing, but sometimes they get lost and Phillips finds herself open, with predictable results.

Do you tag Marinoff? It’s uncertain whether Marinoff will mind, being such a physical player… but if one midfielder is just watching her and not trying to get her own ball, that just leaves more ball for Hatchard or even Mules.

The bad news for the Crows is that their next four games are against Fremantle, North Melbourne, GWS and Melbourne.

Of those three, only GWS is a ‘should win’, and in the crowded Conference A, and having already lost a game they should have won easily, losing one more will likely cost them a place in the finals.

Ebony Marinoff and Chloe Scheer (Photo by AFL Media)

Melbourne Demons vs Brisbane Lions

I’m supposed to be impartial (at least until West Coast enters the competition) so I probably shouldn’t have enjoyed this game as much as I did.

But as a fan of attacking football, the first half in particular was as entertaining a game of women’s footy as a blowout can produce.

We’re also not supposed to compare women’s football to men’s football, but in the second quarter, the Demons’ ball movement achieved in patches the same speed and precision of your average AFL game.

We all know the Demons have a very strong midfield, even without Daisy Pearce, but it’s obvious from watching their stoppages and the way the mids combine in set plays that they’ve been practising a style of fast, overlapping play that even North Melbourne don’t do.

It’s a curious thing, because in earlier rounds, the teams that handballed the most were often losing… but those were the more defensively-minded teams, and most of their handballs were just going around in circles to avoid getting tackled.

The Demons handball aggressively, backing their pace and running in support like rugby players attacking one end of the defensive line, then looping the handball over the top for a teammate to run onto.

They can also hit targets by foot, and between the two, combined with their blistering foot speed, the Lions’ vaunted defence began to look stretched and desperate.

And here’s the thing that the Demons exposed — AFLW defences have had it easy in the competition’s history so far.

Teams’ methods of attack have been predictable — either Bec Goddard’s long bombs, or Paul Groves’ methodical short-passing buildups, defenders have pretty much known what’s coming, and have defended pretty effectively against it, leading to low scores.

The Lions were rated the best defence in the competition leading into this game, but in the first half, Melbourne tore them up like tissue paper — not only were there the twin talls of Tegan Cunningham and EdenZanker, and the speedy Kate Hore on her leads, but there’s the ridiculous pace of Aliesha Newman (19 disposals, three goals), the dazzling creativity of Tyla Hanks, and the sheer speed with which the midfield speared the ball into their forward line.

The point here is that it’s misleading to say that this was a bad day for Brisbane’s defenders, or that someone somehow screwed up.

The point is that no defence, no matter how good, can withstand this style of play when it’s executed this well.

The Demons’ second quarter demonstrated the new high water mark for women’s football — what happens when the improving skills of the players allows the employment of tactics that they would simply not have been capable of in previous seasons.

And the shellshocked looks on the Lions’ faces at halftime said it all — like you’d imagine a Napoleonic army would look after a brief firefight with the present day US Marine Corps. They’d never seen anything like it.

Yes, you can blame the number of players Brisbane lost in the expansion, but Melbourne lost a lot of players too — Mel Hickey, Richelle Cranston, Erin Hoare and Anna Teague.

In commentary, veteran footy watchers Alastair Lynch and Bec Goddard both picked the Lions, so Craig Starcevich’s comments in the post-game presser that his poor team were a struggling bunch of newbies now in a ‘rebuilding’ phase were disingenuous.

If there had been an obvious difference in talent on paper going into the game, everyone would have been picking the Demons, and they weren’t.

The Demons won in a canter not because their team was obviously more talented, but because they employed modern footy against obsolete footy. If the Lions had played a similar style, they might have won.

Finding themselves down at halftime, they improved enormously in the second half simply by using the corridor and being aggressive, but the thing with a team that values defence over offence is that when they need rapid goals, they’ve almost no chance of producing them.

The women’s game has changed, and old-style defensive coaches must now adjust or become extinct.

There are still concerns for the Demons. Their gamestyle matches up wonderfully on teams like Brisbane, but against the other big five ball-movers, they’ll find exactly the same thing being done back to them.

Also, it must be noted that the devastating first-half form was not repeated in the second half. Brisbane improved, but Melbourne also turned off.

It didn’t hurt them against Brisbane, but against the better teams it will.

Happily for the Demons, their next four games are North Melbourne, GWS, Western Bulldogs and Adelaide — only two of what I’m counting as the new-style teams.

On this form they’ll beat GWS and the Bulldogs handily. North and Adelaide? Those should be fun.