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AFLW Round 5 wrap

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Roar Guru
11th March, 2020
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The AFLW has done a better job than last year in distributing the teams between conferences, but still it seemed obvious this year that Conference B was always going to be tougher than Conference A.

And so it’s turned out, with Conference A teams after Round 5 having accumulated 64 points, while Conference B has 76.

As things stand, Conference A has two teams that certainly deserve to make the finals, while Conference B has four. So one deserving team in Conference B is going to miss out, while one much weaker team from Conference A will get in. At this point, that looks like GWS. Right now, the team outside the finals is Collingwood, but that could change.

North Melbourne or Fremantle?
The consensus two best teams in the competition right now are North Melbourne and Fremantle. Most would probably favour North, despite them having lost one game while Fremantle remains undefeated. We’ve established that the Demons can beat North Melbourne, so there’s that. But we’ve also established that, if not for some unlucky breaks, the Magpies and the Saints could easily have beaten the Dockers. When finals come around, it’s the team with the least vulnerabilities that’s most likely to come out on top, and despite Fremantle’s convincing win over Brisbane, that looks like North.

North are pretty good at everything. They get the most disposals per game at 225.8, they take the second most marks per game with 46.2, and despite spending far more time with the ball than most of their opponents, they’re still fourth in tackles with 61 per game.

Sophie Abbatangelo

(Photo by Kelly Defina/Getty Images)

The biggest move made by Scott Gowans this season has been the move of Jasmine Garner into the midfield. There’s a trend AFLW-wide to try and move bigger bodies into the middle to win the contested ball, and at 175 centimetres, Garner fits the bill. This season she’s averaging 22 touches, one goal and 4.4 tackles per game, and is probably in a two-woman race for league MVP with Collingwood’s Jamie Lambert.

Add that to Emma Kearney’s 21 touches, Jenna Bruton’s 17, and Ash Riddell’s 21, and there’s no doubt that North has comfortably the most deadly midfield in the country. I’d tell you what North’s clearances are doing against their opponents this season, but like so many things, the AFLW website won’t tell me, so I’ll say instead that the Roos haven’t been beaten in clearances by any of their five opponents so far. North lead the competition in average score at 46.6 per game while only conceding 23.2, for a ladder percentage of 209.5.

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By contrast, Fremantle play a remarkable cannonball game style, where despite their undefeated record, they’re actually averaging the second-lowest number of disposals in the competition at 173, just ahead of the West Coast Eagles with 162, and just behind the Tigers and the Bulldogs with 174 and 183 respectively. Where North attempt to possess the ball and determine their own fate, Fremantle throw caution to the wind, play on at all costs and attempt to break their own records for the fastest time from back line to forward line, backing their fitness to run opponents off their feet and terrify defenders into mistakes.

It’s possible to go through Fremantle’s line-up and, aside from Kiara Bowers’ 16 disposals and nearly 15 tackles per game, remark at how relatively low the possession numbers are for most of Freo’s stars compared to North Melbourne’s. But it’s not necessarily that Freo’s players aren’t as good, more that it reflects the different game style where Freo’s stars won’t rack up possessions with fancy lateral passes and handballing around the contest. They’ll maintain their structure length-wise up and down the ground so they’ve always got someone to kick it to, and at first chance they’ll kick it to them, contest or not.

Kiara Bowers

(Daniel Carson/AFL Photos via Getty Images)

This means that Freo backs their players to win every contest one-on-one, and bets that most of their direct opponents won’t be as fit, as strong or as fast. Unsurprisingly, Fremantle lead the competition in tackles with 69.2. Sure, a third of that is just Kiara Bowers and Katie Jane Grieve (7.4 tackles per game) but it still counts. North may be the most technically skilled team in the competition, but Fremantle are by far the most physical, treating their opponents like your dog treats her favourite chew toy.

An annoying result of the current AFLW structure is that Fremantle and North Melbourne will not play each other in the regular season, so we won’t get to see this head-to-head resolved until the finals, and possibly not even then. What’s great about both teams is that while both are extremely different, neither is boring to watch, and both are capable of taking their respective styles to new levels as skill levels improve across the coming years.

Brisbane versus Collingwood
This promises to be the other most interesting match of Round 6 after Carlton vs Melbourne. Brisbane have been knocked down a peg after their first defeat of the season against Fremantle, while Collingwood bounced back strongly following their loss to the Demons in Round 4 with a Round 5 win against the Bulldogs.

Both teams are almost exactly evenly matched. Collingwood average 37.2 points per game, while Brisbane average 36.8. Brisbane has a better win-loss record, but Collingwood were desperately unlucky not to beat Fremantle in Fremantle, a task the Lions comprehensively failed to achieve in Round 5. Collingwood still have the better list on paper, even having lost star defender Ash Brazill for the season, but the Lions have made a habit their entire time in the AFLW of defying expectations of better or worse lists and winning anyway.

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Emily Bates and Ally Anderson are having their usual standout years for Brisbane in the midfield with 23 and 21 possessions per game respectively, while for the Pies, Jamie Lambert is giving Jasmine Garner competition for league MVP with 25 touches per game, Bri Davey is contributing 20 and Brit Bonnici is going at a career best 18, and Sarah Rowe is adding 15 more on the wing.

Down back the Lions have found a serious gun in Catherine Svarc, who may even take the Pies’ Chloe Molloy, who looked deadly up forward against the Bulldogs with 3.2. At their own defensive end, the Pies will be struggling to find someone to go with Jesse Wardlaw, who with Ash Brazill and Ruby Schleicher out, is surely too fast for Stacey Livingstone, and too good for Erica Fowler.

The Lions’ greatest strength is their balance between offence and defence, their hard pressure and neat ball movement together – two opposing sides of the game many AFLW teams have struggled to balance in the past. Their greatest Achilles heel remains scoring, where despite their newfound firepower with both Jesse Wardlaw and Jess Weutschner up forward, they haven’t yet demonstrated the ability to rack up the big scores that Melbourne, North and Fremantle are capable of. Reflecting this is their ladder percentage of just 129, low for a team that was until last weekend undefeated.

Collingwood’s ladder percentage is 137, despite having lost more games than Brisbane. Their attacking flair and ball movement is superior to Brisbane’s, but they demonstrated a tendency against Melbourne and elsewhere to overuse the handball and go sideways instead of forward. I still maintain that Collingwood’s best football lies ahead of them, once they get their system fully figured out. However, I’m not certain that the Lions are capable of improving to quite the same degree.

AFLW Collingwood.

(Photo by Kelly Defina/Getty Images)

The improvement in Collingwood’s list this season has been enormous, partly because the new coaching style has allowed these players to flourish, and partly because so many players were still inexperienced and desperate to learn. Brit Bonnici has gone from 13 disposals a game last year to 18 this year, Lauren Butler from three to nine, Mikala Cann from five to 11, Steph Chiocci from ten to 15, Jordan Membrey from four to eight, Sarah Rowe from ten to 15, and most impressively of all, Sharni Layton from four to 11-plus, in hit-outs, from 6.8 to 20.4 and a whole big bunch of one per-centers that don’t get a stat.

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If the Pies get it together, I still give them a sneaky chance at the premiership, and the recent move of Chloe Molloy forward may work to straighten them up and not overdo the handball in getting it forward. But if they lose to the Lions, that’s going to become a whole lot less likely.

The future
And lastly, even though it’s not AFLW, a little something extra about the future of women’s football. On the NAB League phone app, I saw that a 15-year-old kid named Montana Ham had 19 possessions in her first game for the Western Jets. So I decided to watch a few minutes of the game against the Bendigo Pioneers on YouTube, but then I couldn’t turn it off.

Ham is 177 centimetres (and maybe still growing?), and is faster in a straight line than any female junior I’ve seen. Early in the third quarter she set the grass on fire streaking from one end to the other with about four bounces. She takes a grab like a key forward, and has elite ball skills for a 15-year-old like a gun midfielder. Against Murray Bushrangers the next weekend she had 22 touches, and in the Bendigo game at least she was played midfield, back line and forward.

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If she’d played the whole game in the middle (for which she may not yet have the tank) I reckon she could have had 30. Also, Ham’s fellow 15-year-old teammate Charlotte Baskaran got a similar number of possessions in the midfield, and looks like she’s going to be another gun, if a more regular-sized one.

For a year or two, people have been talking about Georgie Prespakis of the Calder Cannons as potentially the best female player in the game, but now it seems her reign may be short lived. At the end of the 2022 and 2023 seasons the AFLW may have to get serious, warning struggling Victorian teams about tanking. It’s never been an issue before, but if the reward for picking first for 2023 or 2024 is Prespakis or Ham, it’s going to get very tempting.

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The most fun thing about AFLW is that no one really knows what level female football can reach. I won’t be the least bit surprised if next year, another 15-year-old pops up who puts Montana Ham in the shade. Watching them all develop will be a fun ride.

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