AFL women’s match review: Western Bulldogs v. Melbourne at Footscray

This blog has previously expressed interest in the wingman-less sixteen-a-side form of footy played in the Victorian Football Association between 1959 and 1992. We got a chance to see how this would work in a modern footballing context on Saturday night, when the AFL’s women’s exhibition match was played on the Whitten Oval between two sixteens notionally representing the Western Bulldogs and Melbourne.

The Bulldogs’ captain Steph Chiocci won the toss, and a tight first quarter ended with one goal apiece, the hosts leading 1.3 to 1.2. The Bulldogs responded with the first two goals of the second stanza, and thanks to some wayward Demons kicking – a product, perhaps, of the undersized ball being trialled – they outgoaled their opponents four to two to head into the main break leading 5.3 to 3.7.

It was the four consecutive third-quarter goals of VWFL centurion Moana Hope which put the match out of Melbourne’s reach: a holding-the-ball free, an uncontested snap, a snap under pressure, and an angled set shot took the Tricolours to a thirty-three point lead at the final change. With six goals for the night, the tattooed Collingwood recruit would pick up a well-deserved best-on-ground.

As fatigue set in despite the six-strong interchange benches, the two sides combined for a seven-goal last quarter, book-ended by Tayla Harris’ one-bounce set-shot bomb from outside fifty and Hope’s running supergoal. 6365 had taken advantage of free entry to witness a hard, contested encounter by the new ‘it’ girls of Australian sport.

But what exactly did they witness? I recorded the ball-ups, boundary throw-ins, and secondary stoppages, and also took note of the inside 50s toward the end of the match.

This season, AFL teams averaged 52.17 inside 50s per match. Considering that the women’s match was played over flat twenty-minute quarters instead of the thirty minutes (inclusive of time-on) used by the men, that equates to 34.78 over eighty minutes. Melbourne’s tally of 42 and the Bulldogs’ tally of 39 are both comfortably higher than the rate of inside 50s achieved in the AFL. The teams combined for 1.741 points per inside 50 (Bulldogs: 2.308, Melbourne: 1.214), which is higher than the 1.701 in the 2016 AFL season.

According to a publication put out by the AFL during last season’s hullabaloo about congestion, AFL matches in 2015 averaged 43.7 boundary throw-ins and 29 ball-ups, for a total of 72.7 stoppages, 22% of which were secondary stoppages. (Equivalent figures for 2016 have not been released by Champion Data or sought by the media; apparently everyone has moved on from the Great Congestion Debate of 2015.) Adjusted for the difference in playing time, this equates to 29.13 boundary throw-ins, 19.33 ball-ups, and 48.47 total stoppages.

The women’s match had 34 ball-ups and 11 boundary throw-ins for 45 stoppages, five of which, or 11.1%, were secondary stoppages. The number of ball-ups was thus 14.67 more than expected, the number of boundary throw-ins was 18.13 fewer than expected, the total number of stoppages only 3.47 fewer than expected, and the percentage of secondary stoppages was just over half that of the 2015 AFL season.

So how does wingless sixteen-a-side footy shape up? If the purpose was to reduce ‘congestion’, which is usually defined as the number of stoppages in a game, it failed. Forcing teams to avoid the wings and flanks simply replaces boundary throw-ins with ball-ups in the corridor. It does, however, increase the number and quality of inside 50 entries: this is why VFA teams averaged 102.37 points per game in the Association’s sixteen-man era.

And that would appear to be the way that AFL House wants it. The rhetoric surrounding the women’s league has been all about ‘free-flowing’, ‘high-scoring’ footy, free from ‘congestion’. The powers-that-be have floated nine-point supergoals, last-touch out-of-bounds free kicks, and zones to enforce one-on-one match-ups among key position players.

That might appeal to the purists (and to the target audience for the half-time advertisement for the minimal-contact AFL 9’s format) but some of us actually like the congested, handball-heavy, high-interchange modern footy. Let’s have these girls play the game as it is played nowadays, not the way it was played in the imagined golden past of the purists.

Western Bulldogs 14.6.90 (Hope 6, Vescio 3, Ashmore 2, Brennan 1, Jakkobson 1, Lambert 1) – Melbourne 7.9.51 (Frederick-Traub 2, Harris 2, Marinoff 1, Foley 1, Eva 1)