Is there a better female athlete in Australia right now than Erin Phillips?
It seems that her athletic prowess and sporting genius allows her to dominate Aussie rules football, basketball and whatever sport she decides to play.
She mentioned Tuesday night while accepting her Best and Fairest (we need a better name for the women’s Brownlow – presumably the ‘Phillips’ once she retires) that “people felt sorry for (Port legend Greg Phillips, her dad) because he didn’t have a son to play footy… to carry on the Phillips name.”
His will be the last generation that ever says that sentence in Australia.
So, would I be right in assuming that the reason there was no early game on Saturday back in Round 2 was because somebody back in the scheduling department presumed there’d be a championship game on the women’s side in that time slot? And a follow-up question – why was the AFLW title game on Sunday instead of Saturday, anyway?
Erin Phillips of the Adelaide Crows. (Photo by Mark Brake/Getty Images)
Speaking of the AFLW championship game, talk about a tale of two halves! That first half was as good a demonstration of what women’s footy can be as is imaginable! Chloe Scheer’s tremendous soaring mark – fantastic goals that were as good as anything kicked during the season – seventy-two points in one half of football! Adelaide and Carlton were both tremendous.
And then – the second half of that game needs to be burned, buried, and forgotten by all who had the misfortune of watching it. There were more year-long rehab injuries than goals that half-time – when does that happen?
This is how indefensible that last quarter was: have you watched the AFL media highlights package? The only thing in the fourth quarter portion of that video is Erin Phillips returning to the field on crutches while the announcement of the 53,034 in attendance was made. Truth be told, that was indeed the only highlight of the entire half.
Before we leave that game, let’s take a moment to consider the crowd. In total, 53,034 fans in attendance, by far the largest crowd to watch a women’s footy match in history.
Remember, the previous record (41K) was set almost as a gimmick – last year, the Fremantle women got to host the very first game ever played in the brand-new Optus Stadium (male or female), so out of that forty-thousand in attendance, it would be safe to say that half the crowd came at least in large part to see the stadium and not the football.
Adelaide Crows players celebrate as the final siren sounds during the AFLW Grand Final match between the Adelaide Crows and the Carlton Blues at Adelaide Oval on March 31, 2019 in Adelaide, Australia. (Photo by Daniel Kalisz/Getty Images)
There were no gimmicks here. The fifth-largest crowd for any game at Adelaide Oval came to watch a game that most thought was a foregone conclusion (and most were right). But they came.
They came for a celebration of women’s footy, of their once and future champions in the City of Churches, and the decision to utilise the AO for a pair of women’s finals matches was not only brilliant in hindsight but utterly necessary.
There was no Ikon Park-lockout Sunday morning. It was amazing to get half-a-hundred thousand there for morning football!
53,034 in attendance. For comparison:
• The average crowd for a men’s final at that venue (there have been five since it opened) is only 49,337. The average regular season crowd is 43,558.
• The average finals crowd for a Sydney Swans home final is only 43,612 over the last twenty years (also per AFL Tables). In fact, the only two venues in Australia which can claim an average finals attendance surpassing Sunday’s AFLW crowd are Perth Stadium and, of course, the MCG.
• The total number of people who’ve ever seen an AFL game in China is less than half.
• There has never been a footy crowd in Queensland to equal it.
• Compare this to the third year of the AFLW’s existence: In its third year of existence, the VFL’s grand final (when Fitzroy defeated South Melbourne 27-26) had an attendance of only 4,823.
• But the first time that more than the AFLW’s 53,034 probably saw a men’s football game was at the 1908 VFL grand final, during the twelfth year of the league’s existence and the seventh year the GF was at the MCG, when “approximately” 53,400 watched Carlton defeat Essendon 35-26, without scoring a goal in the second half (it was 34-16 at the long break). There was only one goal scored by either team in the third and fourth quarters combined – so, yeah, it was a lot like the game Sunday…
It’s been seven months, and we still speak of the ‘Mason Cox moment’ from the prelim finals last spring, which was essentially about a five-minute stretch of time during the second quarter when he utterly dominated the Richmond backline.
Jack Riewoldt admitted on AFL 360 last week that he’d sledged Cox before that quarter about not doing very much marking yet – and then regretted it tremendously about a half hour later! When Christmas comes close, will we be looking at last Thursday’s Richmond-Collingwood match as the moment when Jordan de Goey took his star turn?
Jordan De Goey of the Magpies (Photo by Dylan Burns/AFL Photos)
Between the AFL.com tipping contest and the ESPN contest, there are currently about 900,000 entrants who predicted the first eighteen games of the men’s season.
Some of us “might” have multiple entries.
Of those 900,000 entries, not a single one got all eighteen right. Or 17 right.
The leader among the 650,000 at ESPN’s website has 16 out of 18 correct, somehow, and the leader on the league-run site is at 15, with 250,000 entrants behind him or her.
There are only about 400 of us here tipping with The Roar, but our leader has only twelve out of eighteen, which decent coin-flipping should have beaten.
Translation – it’s been a highly unpredictable year so far.
Suns sing the team song after winning the Round 2 AFL match between the Gold Coast Suns and the Fremantle Dockers (Photo by Chris Hyde/Getty Images)
Here’s how tough it’s been. On the AFL website, there’s a note for each game you tip mentioning what percentage is tipping for each team.
As I’m somewhat OCD and track these sorts of things for our meta-analyses, I can go back and figure out what the odds would have been to have nailed all 18 picks so far – just two correct rounds.
First round: the percentages for the teams that won were 95, 22, 8, 12, 20, 11, 93, 77, and 72.
Second round: the percentages were 29, 26, 26, 95, 88, 69, 63, 13, and 11.
To calculate a combined probability, you just multiply the individual probabilities:
For the first round, the chance of getting a perfect score would be 0.002276 per cent, or one in 43,940. Not impossible.
For the second round, the chance of a perfect nine-for-nine was better: 0.010188 per cent, which is “only” one out of 9816. Highly doable.
But, the odds of nailing both weeks back to back and currently being 18 of 18? A wee bit higher. Multiply the two of those together, and you find out your odds are one in 431 million.
To be precise, they’re 1:431,303,918 and change. That translates to a probability of 0.000000231855 per cent.
For comparison, the odds of being killed by a vending machine are only 1 in 112 million.
The odds of dying in an elevator accident are only 1 in 10 million.
The odds of a woman giving birth to identical quadruplets are 1 in 15 million. (The odds of a man doing it are somewhat higher.)
The odds that you will contract the bubonic plague in your lifetime are 1 in 46.6 million. Still not as good. Or not as bad. I don’t know any more…
And the odds of flipping a coin 18 times and getting heads each time (or tails each time, if you prefer) are just 1 in 262,144.
That means you have about a 1650-times better chance of having picked the eighteen winners by randomly choosing a team than by actually trying to pick the winners, if you know anything about footy.
Therefore, for Round 3, your best bet is to flip nine coins and go with it. You might do far better than the rest of us.
Who’s in your ultimate team? Pick the best team and compete with other fans for daily prizes on Draftstars. For the best odds on the game try out Aussie bookmaker PlayUp. Think. Is this a bet you really want to place? Set a deposit limit.
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