2019 AFLW Grand Final: Talking about the football, and talking about the future

I could talk to you about the emotion of the day, and what a huge moment it was for women’s football in Australia, but the reason I started writing these articles is because the regular media was already full of little else.

It’s important to get the human drama, but I felt that what was happening, as often happens with women’s sports, was that everyone wanted to do human interest stories and no one wanted to actually talk about the football.

The very real drama and human interest is being thoroughly covered elsewhere — I’ll just talk about the footy.

Firstly, the controversial. As I said to my fellow media box journos (it’s fun for a Science Fiction author to pretend to be that for a few months) the Crows’ most valuable player was actually Eloise Jones.

To make sure I wasn’t crazy, I rewatched the first half of the game again — where nine of Adelaide’s ten goals were scored, and the match decided — and discovered that sure enough, five of those nine goals pretty much belonged to Jones, four of them by direct assist, and one that she kicked herself.

Plus in Adelaide’s fourth goal, she took a big mark in the middle of the ground that allowed the ball to transition to an open run down the far wing, the one big play that set up all the rest.

Five and a half goals out of nine in the first half, and she doesn’t win best on ground? I love Erin too, but come on.

Giving the award to Erin certainly helped make the drama of the day, but I dislike the thought that deserving younger players get overlooked so that the media has a better headline.

Looking at the voting, however, it seems that Jones didn’t get a single vote — comforting, I guess, in that it means the judges weren’t so much biased as generally without a clue.

The other player who deserves a huge plug at this point is Anne Hatchard. Not only did she have a huge Grand Final with 24 disposals and six tackles, Hatchard’s massive improvement this season is a big part of the reason the Crows were so dominant in the first place.

Carlton looked strong at the contest in the first quarter, but in the second quarter the Crows’ midfield, with Phillips and Hatchard starring, clicked into gear.

With Ebony Marinoff struggling with a Jess Edwards tag, the Crows’ team would have looked quite different if Hatchard was still in 2017-18 form. But this year shutting down one of Adelaide’s star mids isn’t enough, and Hatchard in particular started to run riot through the middle.

The devastating thing about Adelaide is not only their midfield strength, but the efficiency of their forward line.

Carlton actually ended the match with more Inside 50s than Adelaide, 28 to 24, but while the Blues only got nine scoring shots for their efforts, the Crows had 17, and were far more accurate, mostly because their entries were so much faster and more accurate.

This is the other reason why Eloise Jones should have been awarded best on ground — not only did she effectively get the Crows half of their goals, but in helping to make the forward line so efficient, she took away any hope Carlton had of staying in the match with defensive rebounds.

Carlton have been pretty good this season at getting run from their defence, but in order to do that, they first have to stop the opposition’s entry from scoring a goal.

That achieved, a team with Carlton’s run can get the ball down the other end relatively quickly to create a scoring opportunity for themselves.

This is a big difference between the playing styles of Carlton and, say, Geelong. Geelong committed lots of players to the stoppages in an attempt to shut down all opposition run, but did so at the cost of scoring themselves.

Carlton committed relatively few players to the stoppage, and were content to lose their share of stoppage contests because they a) backed their own run to move the ball the other way once they regained it, and b) wanted to have players free forward of the ball to kick goals once they did.

But against the Crows, those inside 50s simply never rebounded because so many of them were resulting in goals, and so the second chance never arrived.

Much of that was Jones, but Chloe Scheer was also huge, and while Phillips’ ACL got more attention, Scheer’s was equally sad.

The mark and kick to set up a Danielle Ponter goal just minutes earlier was one of the best things yet seen in women’s footy, and showed again that Scheer has the talent not just to be a good player, but a great one mentioned in the same breath as players like Phillips and Randall.

And once again, between her, Stevie-Lee Thompson, Danielle Ponter (who got herself into excellent position all game for the likes of Scheer and Jones to hit up, and finished with three goals) there were simply too many good Adelaide forwards for Carlton to handle.

But the thing that really killed Carlton was the directness and efficiency of Adelaide’s ball movement. Against Fremantle, Carlton were successful in preventing the Dockers from getting the ball over the back of their defence, but Adelaide’s ball movement was simply too fast and precise.

The Crows are full of players with long, direct kicks, and coming off halfback in particular, it changes the game. With only sixteen players on the ground, there’s plenty of space on an AFLW field at any given time, it’s just that most teams lack the kicking precision and distance to get the ball into that space and take advantage.

But the Crows found it time and time again, had the work rate to get into that space in the first place, and then ran the Carlton defenders off their feet.

In short, this Adelaide Crows team is starting to play football that, in basic structure and philosophy at least, resembles the men’s game.

It’s a heck of a long way for any AFLW club to come from the olden days of 2017, and everyone involved in this team should feel enormously proud of what they’ve achieved not just for Adelaide, but for all women’s football.

The Crows are now the league benchmark, and they show the sceptical football public what women’s football is capable of. The challenge now for the rest of the league is to try and catch them.

(Photo by Daniel Kalisz/Getty Images)

The future

My guess is that Erin Phillips will want to keep playing football until her body tells her she can’t — this knee reconstruction will be the first test of that, at age 33.

Given what a physical specimen and professional she is, my guess is she’ll make a complete recovery and come back better than ever.

But she might not do it in time to get in a full preseason for next year, meaning she could sit it out entirely, or limit herself to playing out of the goal square.

If it’s the latter, the Crows will still have the competition’s most deadly forward line, but will also have an opportunity opening in the midfield. A job for Eloise Jones, perhaps?

Which could then raise the question of whether that goal square is big enough for both her and Chloe Scheer, who could be in the same boat. Time will tell how their recoveries go.

Then there’s the question of where Chelsea Randall goes. That West Coast will throw everything they’ve got into luring her back to become the Eagles’ women’s team inaugural captain is a given. Whether she takes it is something only Randall can answer.

Worst case scenario, Adelaide could be playing next season without Randall, Phillips and Scheer, three of the most talented women in football.

But with the Crows’ depth right now, they’d probably still be the best team in the comp — a Marinoff-Hatchard-Jones midfield combination would be darned good too, and while the forward line would obviously miss Phillips, Jones and Scheer, the Crows have Ruth Wallace, Jess Allen and Jasmine Hewitt to come back, all of whom could conceivably play forward, or free up an existing defender to do so.

And then there’s first-round draft pick Nikki Gore, who barely played this season due mostly to the Crows functioning like an AFL men’s team and simply being too deep for new kids to get a game in rather than anything Gore’s done wrong.

South Australia still isn’t producing as much talent as other states, but the top players tend to be excellent, the Crows have no domestic competitor to grab them, and the Crows will get their usual couple of new ones next year as well.

Add to that the promise of youngsters like Sarah Allen, Danielle Ponter and Hannah Martin, and there’s plenty of improvement left in the existing Adelaide lineup.

If Adelaide can get Phillips and Scheer back in time for a full season, and keep Randall in Adelaide, you could just about pencil them in for the 2020 championship now.

The AFLW heirachy might not like that, wanting to spread the success around a little more, but I’d argue that’s no bad thing, and probably a good one.

In a new sport, teams, like players, need exemplars or heroes for everyone to look up to. Erin Phillips serves that purpose as a player, and the Adelaide Crows serve it as a team.

One of the biggest problems in the AFLW is getting the media and public to believe in an exciting vision of the future.

If you were to spin them a vision of a domestic women’s competition where teams play fast, exciting football, where talented players regularly do things that the broad swathe of footballing public find genuinely entertaining and will tell their friends about, then many people will remain cynical until you show them.

Well, this season’s Adelaide Crows are that team, and the people have now been shown. The grand final wasn’t close, but the 53,000 fans who showed up were genuinely entertained, and if they could be guaranteed a similar show every game, I see no reason why next season the Crows shouldn’t play every possible home game at the Adelaide Oval, because their standard is getting genuinely good enough to deserve it.

That then raises the bar for every other club in the AFLW, and gives them a standard to chase, and crowd numbers to be productively envious of.

Yes, it may mean a Crows premiership every year for the next four years (or until Port Adelaide finally get a women’s team and split the SA talent pool) but if that’s what it takes to shake the rest of the AFLW into shape, so be it. Of course, the AFL will likely remove South Australia’s special access to Northern Territory talent if any of that looks likely.

And as for Carlton, don’t write off the Blues. I stand by everything I said about them coming into the latter part of the season — this club has some of the largest upside in the competition.

Next comes the greatest challenge of every club in this rapidly-expanding age (or every club except Adelaide) — keeping as much of the list’s top-end at the club as possible.

But if the Blues can do that, just look at the inexperience of players whom this year we have discovered can really play. In the midfield, Bri Davey’s still only 24, and looks to be a full-time midfielder from now on — a position she’s new to, and will improve a lot in the more she plays.

Maddie Prespakis, of course, will be 19 next year and is destined to be one of the greats. Jess Edwards is 29 but is a late bloomer, Chloe Dalton’s only been playing for a year, and kids who didn’t play much this year, like Abbie McKay and Emerson Woods could improve as rapidly as Georgia Gee did last year, and play big roles in 2020 — and speaking of Gee, she’ll be only 20.

Up forward, Tayla Harris will be 22 next year — just a kid in footy terms, and only now with the midfield to actually get her the ball how she likes it.

If you don’t think she’ll be hungrier than a starving Rottweiler for next season to start, you haven’t been paying attention. Brooke Walker’s only been playing for one year also, and Bree Moody’s only 22.

Then down back, Jade Van Dyk will be 24 but very new to top-level footy, Charlotte Wilson 19, and both Hoskings (there really needs to be a grammatically simpler plural for multiple Hoskings-es) will be 24 as well.

Daniel Harford has said (only half-jokingly, I suspect) that he’s going to check out the rest of the Australian women’s rugby sevens team in the offseason, so who knows what other talent he can find given the record he’s had with Walker and Dalton.

And who knows how much better the Blues would have gotten this season, let alone next, if it had been another four games longer? In the second half of the season they were the fastest-improving team in the country, something that only stopped when they ran headlong into a wall of Crows.

If AFLW seasons were twice as long, the improvement in standard the AFL hierarchy is looking for would come twice as fast. Just saying.