Need for speed: A new AFLW trend is afoot

This round of football was brought to you by foot speed. You know, that thing that you think your team has plenty of until the athleticism of the competition hits a new level and it turns out you’ve got none.

My new theory is that foot speed is the main thing that separates this season’s best teams and the rest. So how does that work?

This season’s best four teams are Adelaide, North Melbourne, Melbourne and Fremantle. All of them are fast, and that speed is allowing them to play in ways no AFLW team has managed before.

To kick lots of goals and be aggressive, as these four teams are doing, they have to move the ball quickly into the forward fifty in order to avoid the congestion that has plagued AFLW forward lines in the first two seasons.

Bec Goddard’s Crows used to do this by kicking long, but AFLW back lines are far too strong for that now, and if you just kick it to them and charge, they’ll rebound it and hurt you.

Paul Groves’ Bulldogs did it last year by lots of short chipping, but that’s far too slow this year, it doesn’t break lines and it allows defenders to zone up and clog your passing lanes as they fall back, causing inevitable turnovers.

So teams have to move the ball far more quickly than the Dogs’ short chipping, but they can’t just bomb it long. What that leaves is the overlapping run and handball, moving the ball forward rapidly by running hard and linking up with other runners.

When it works, it allows rapid forward movement without the risk of interceptions and turnovers from forced kicks to contests, and it allows teams to break the lines and open up new possibilities for when the players do kick it.

When most players can only kick 35 meters, defenders can cluster 35 meters away, and force you to kick to them. But if you run thirty meters first, and then kick 35, the defenders are all out of position and whole new areas of the field become accessible.

But it only works if teams are uniformly fast across the field, because if players aren’t quick enough to burst clear of contests, or get space from their direct opponents for a few seconds at least, they’ll just get tackled without gaining distance and they’d probably have been better off kicking it long.

If we look at last weekend’s games, I think all of this gets demonstrated quite nicely.

Geelong Cats versus Brisbane Lions

I’m not sure if Brisbane is slow, exactly, but they play like they’re slow.

A lot of this is because Craig Starcevich doesn’t make much effort to have them run the ball forward, but then, maybe he does that because he knows they’re not quick enough?

I doubt it, I just think he’s playing the same system he’s always played, and the competition is starting to leave him behind.

Either way, it’s not working for Brisbane, whose results in a game like this are well below what the talent of their list suggests they should be capable of.

The Cats aren’t a fast-running team either, but they had 37 Inside 50s to 17, showing that however much their game is increasingly built around their strong defence, they’re capable of moving the ball forward directly when they get the opportunity.

One of the reasons Brisbane look so slow, despite having plenty of fast players, is because they’re so heavily coached and structured they all look like they’re looking for their place in the zone and forgetting to move the ball.

This approach treats football like chess, but football the way the best teams are playing today isn’t chess, it’s pinball, everything always in motion.

If you watched Melbourne or Adelaide this weekend, you’d see players running forward in groups, handballing aggressively to go forward rather than just defensively to get out of trouble.

Brisbane don’t do this, and have spare players charging into the contest to add to the congestion, rather than running to space so that if the ball is won, her teammate will have someone to pass to.

There’s just no anticipation in this Lions team that the correct direction for the ball to be moving is forward.

Geelong aren’t much better, mind you. They play crowded and claustrophobic footy too, but they play it much better, and are prepared to attack through the corridor on occasion, which the Lions rarely do.

It’s a poor joke of the conference system that the Cats are still in contention, and given they’re possibly the only defensive-minded team in the competition that’s actually capable of winning games against more talented sides (Carlton last week), it’s possible they could even cause an upset come semi-final time.

For the sake of the competition’s credibility and entertainment, non-Geelong fans will be hoping otherwise.

Maddy Boyd and Sophie Van De Huevel(Photo by Adam Trafford/AFL Media/Getty Images)

Carlton Blues versus Collingwood Magpies

This was the first match that Collingwood were able to really show what they’ve got. This happened thanks to Carlton’s open structure.

Here’s why the defensively-minded coaches don’t like to play like this — you open up the play, you don’t put so many players at the contest, you spread wide and have lots of one-on-ones, and you can easily take the pressure off your opponent and let them score.

It was the first time the Pies have seen such open space on a football field all season, and they loved it.

You can see how much talent this team has — previous excuses for how young they are or how many stars they’ve lost don’t add up.

There’s lots runners and ball users, particularly among their kids, plus Jamie Lambert is a star as always, and Irishwoman Sarah Rowe has to be one of the hardest working runners in the competition.

They just needed someone to open them up and let the play with space… which Carlton, rather than their own coaching staff, allowed them to do.

Why did Carlton do it? Because it’s how Carlton play. The gamestyle is to simply score more than the opposition, to back individual player skills and kick more goals.

But Carlton got themselves into enormous trouble in the second and third quarters, as Collingwood started playing with the delight of a bunch of puppies taken to the beach after all day cooped up at home.

This revealed Carlton’s problem all season — however much fun their gamestyle when it’s working, it often doesn’t work simply because their skills aren’t consistently high enough across the park.

Constantly playing on, running in support, switching play laterally requires precision passing and clean hands, and while the likes of Brianna Davey, Madison Prespakis and Kerryn Harrington are up to it, many of the rest aren’t.

When the pressure gets high, handballs hit grass, chest marks are dropped and the ground ball turns to soap. This lack of consistent skills across the park is the main reason why the Blues, despite playing some of the most exciting football in the competition, don’t yet belong in the finals with the Big Four of Conference A – but thanks to the conference system, they may end up there anyway.

The Blues also struggle with the balance between playing offensively and playing defensively. In this game they dominated possession with 221 disposals to 169, and had 36 Inside 50s to 23, but were out-tackled 50 to 36.

Maddie Prespakis, an excellent tackler at junior level, failed to make a single tackle all match, and is only averaging two per game all season.

Monique Conti, by comparison, is averaging 4.2 for the Bulldogs, and last weekend had eight. Looking at the way they play and the way they’re built, most would assume that Prespakis would get twice as many tackles as Conti, and in the juniors they’d have probably been right.

But this year the Blues are more interested in running to space than locking down their direct opponent, while the Bulldogs are the opposite, and thus the discrepancy.

It’s a learning process for Dan Harford’s young players, and the pendulum hasn’t yet settled on the happy medium. What it indicates is that the Blues still have a long way to improve.

Daniel Harford (Photo by Brett Hemmings/Getty Images)

Melbourne Demons versus GWS Giants

Melbourne should have won this match by more than the 29 points that they did, but butchered the ball in front of goals in the first half.

The Demons this year set the standard for foot-speed, and the aggressive way they deploy it is exciting to watch.

By contrast, GWS’s supposedly powerful midfield are getting murdered in contests like these, but not how you’d think.

GWS win plenty of clearances, and in this game actually beat the Demons at stoppages 24 to 14. GWS as a team also had plenty of the ball, and were nearly even in disposals, and most surprisingly given the score, in inside 50s.

But the thing with playing aggressively is that it’s not just how often you get the ball inside your forward 50, it’s how well.

The difference is that GWS commit lots of numbers to the ball and win inside, while the Demons keep players out and are content to lose clearances if it means winning outside.

This is a trend with the Big Four Conference A teams — Scott Gowans admitted it was his tactic when North Melbourne comfortably beat the Bulldogs in Round 3.

Foot-speed, once again, is the key, because you simply can’t burst and run the ball forward as Melbourne do without it.

GWS has probably more foot-speed than it first seems, but like Brisbane, their structures are all about getting numbers around the ball and not about running and spreading, so they look slower than they probably are.

Against the Demons, the Giants looked like bulldogs against greyhounds, wheezing and gasping and wishing the fight would turn into a close-range brawl because once it breaks into the open they’ve got no chance.

The result is that GWS can grind the ball forward to get plenty of Inside 50s, but because they’re not getting it in quickly, all of Melbourne’s defenders were back, and it was hard for even their excellent forward trio of Christina Bernardi, Cora Staunton and Yvonne Bonner (who might be the best of them) to find any space.

By contrast, the Demons had less players clogging up lanes and were running to space instead, moving the ball rapidly and entering the forward line before the Giants defenders got back.

Melbourne are also starting to demonstrate an almost Adelaide-like depth this season, with Maddy Gay outdoing all midfielders with 19 disposals, with special mention to the twin marking defenders of Harriet Cordner and Bianca Jakobsson who provide a huge amount of run and rebound off the backline, not to mention Aliesha Newman, who has gone from flash-in-the-pan speedster to consistently one of the best players in the side.

Next week Melbourne get the Bulldogs. Based on recent form, it won’t be close.

Kate Hore and Lily Mithen (Photo by Michael Dodge/Getty Images)

Adelaide Crows versus North Melbourne Kangaroos

The top players of North’s list are pretty equal to Adelaide’s, but Adelaide have the best bottom-end list in the competition by a large margin.

The thing with having so many good players all over the ground, and so many of them being quick and able to hit targets, is that even opponents as good as the Kangaroos have to be very careful how they set up.

At least half of the Crows’ goals came out the back, against North Melbourne defenders who didn’t think they were too high up the ground, but were badly beaten by fast Adelaide forwards or mids getting past them into open ground behind.

Playing too high against Adelaide is risky because they’re so fast, and use the ball so well, they can be behind you before you know it.

But keeping defenders further back takes pressure off Adelaide’s ball movement. Either way, Adelaide force their opponents to do something they’d rather not, which is pretty much the object of sport and war.

Adelaide’s forward line has a bit of the Western Bulldogs’ mosquito fleet from last year about it, only it’s deeper, faster, and gets supplied by a midfield that moves the ball far more rapidly and accurately into attack.

Mathew Clarke’s move of speedster Stevie Lee Thompson into the forward line has been inspired, but Eloise Jones is blossoming into a genuine star with big marks and probably the best disposal in the team, Chloe Scheer was a little quiet in this game but is also a star-in-the-making, and Danielle Ponter’s fast hands and game sense are amazing.

Plus of course Erin Phillips frequently goes forward, Jenna McCormick is useful, and any number of fast mids can push forward and kick goals.

North’s top players matched it with Adelaide’s best, particularly Emma Kearney with 31 disposals (the equivalent of about 55 in an AFL game) and Jess Duffin with 11 marks, five contested, Jamie Stanton and Jasmine Garner with 15 each.

But the lower half of North’s list didn’t fare as well. Adelaide don’t really have any ‘bottom’ players this year, all of them are good.

Adelaide can therefore afford to move the ball through many sets of hands and be reasonably confident that none of them will mess up and turn it over.

Moving the ball it was obvious that North can’t have the same degree of confidence with all of their list, at least not under this kind of pressure.

Also, while both teams love to play more outside than inside, North still preferred to kick the ball by 153 to 138, while the Crows preferred to handball by a margin of 99 to 65.

Coming into this game I’d thought North were pretty fast, but handballing advantages like this happen not just because of a gameplan, but because of opportunities that arise in the game.

If Adelaide had this many more opportunities to handball, you can bet it’s because their players are simply faster, and have more confidence in each others’ foot-speed.

And worse for North, not only did Adelaide beat them on the outside, they beat them on the inside as well, winning clearances 27 to 20.

North are very good, but Adelaide are now the benchmark team in the competition — their first-round loss to the Bulldogs was a freak event caused by awful goal kicking, despite them winning everywhere else on the ground.

If you discount that, the Crows haven’t truly been beaten in general play this season.

The only team that comes close to matching their depth is Melbourne. They meet in Round 7 at Casey Fields, and for once Channel Seven will actually be covering a good game.

Erin Phillips (AAP Image/Tracey Nearmy)

Fremantle Dockers versus Western Bulldogs

Same old Bulldogs — they win disposals 190 to 181, they have more marks 39 to 25, more hitouts 33 to 28, yet get flogged in Inside 50s 37 to 17 and lose the match 52 to 34.

The gameplan is to get numbers around the ball, win clearances and then hold onto possession with short passes and lots of marks. But not only did most of those advances not even reach their forward 50, they didn’t even win clearances, losing 25 to 35.

There’s a lot of good players on this team being wasted, players who’d love to handball, play on and break the lines, but can’t within this structure.

Teams with unsatisfied players tend to get raided by opposing clubs in the off-season, particularly in expansion years.

If I’m Richmond or St Kilda, I’d love to have Monique Conti, Ellie Blackburn, Aisling Utri or Libby Birch next year, to name just a few who’d be doing more if they were playing for one of the faster, more exciting teams. Just saying.

I said a few rounds back that Freo would be dramatically improved if they could get Kellie Gibson involved on the scoreboard, and since then she’s had one goal last week, and three against the Bulldogs.

A remaining concern for the Dockers is their relative lack of depth compared to the likes of Melbourne and Adelaide, and their reliance on too few players — in this game not just Gibson, but Dana Hooker once again with 21 and nine tackles, and Kiara Bowers with a ridiculous 23 and 14.

After that, the midfield in particular fell right away, Kara Donnellan had 14 and Haley Miller had nine.

Donnellan was once a dominant midfielder, and while I don’t think she’s gone backward, treading water in this competition sure looks like going backward when everyone else is rapidly improving.

Considering how much more directly Fremantle play, and the massive mismatch in Inside 50s they had, this match should never have been as close.

But Ebony Antonio was quiet, and when that happens, much of the load falls on Gemma Houghton and Kellie Gibson, and the Dockers lack those reliable multiple goal scorers that a team like Adelaide have.

Fremantle remain one of the best teams in the competition, but in the last two rounds, that lack of depth has started to show.

Next year the Eagles will inevitably strip some of their best talent away. This year might be Fremantle’s last best chance at the finals for quite some time.