Crows AFLW coach Matthew Clarke admits 2020 season was disappointing, but still taking some positives from it all
Reigning premiers Adelaide will watch the AFLW finals from the sidelines – a position it didn’t expect to find itself in at the start of the season. But the team can still take positives out of its 2020 campaign.
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Adelaide’s 2020 AFLW season came to an abrupt end on Wednesday night when the AFL officially cancelled the competition’s two remaining minor round games in favour of fast-tracking a three-week finals series in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.
It left the league’s reigning premier in a position it didn’t expect to be at the start of the season: watching finals from the loungeroom.
But the Crows are nonetheless taking positives from the year that saw them slide from 2019’s almost-unbeatables (with an 8-1 record), to missing the pointy end of the season with a 2-4 win/loss record.
Had the season continued, there is every chance Adelaide could have finished on 4-4 (it was next scheduled to play Gold Coast and then the winless Richmond) and the irony of it all is that it would have played finals had it beaten GWS on Sunday (the Crows lost by five points).
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But that’s all ‘shoulda, coulda, woulda’.
The reality is that as of Wednesday night they were sitting sixth in Conference A.
Season, done.
Coach Matthew Clarke admitted it was hard to find too many positives.
“I thought it was a really disappointing season … other than getting some exposure of games into young players and for those players to get an understanding of the level required in AFLW,” he said.
“Probably the only other thing that I took out as a genuine positive was despite a really challenging year in terms of performance … the group did stay really well connected and there wasn’t a sense of abandonment of our team philosophies, particularly off the field.
“On field, we drifted … but away from that, their application at training, the way they stayed connected to one another was pleasing.”
Among the injuries that hampered the season was co-captain Chelsea Randall tearing her anterior cruciate ligament on day one of the pre-season and ruck Jess Foley ruled out from round four with a mid-foot sprain.
Clarke said the return of both Erin Phillips and Rhi Metcalfe from ACLs were pleasing.
“I knew we were going to face some challenges this season,” he said.
“(But) I felt that we would be able to withstand it and come through it a bit better than we did.”
Randall said the club was looking to put the 2020 season behind it.
“It wasn’t, overall, exactly what we had planned, but that’s a part of sport and how it rolls: some you win and others you don’t,” she said.
“It’s a bit like life, really, and generally the seasons that don’t go as well as you planned are the ones you learn and grow from the most.
“I’ve definitely taken a lot out of it, this season, and (am) already looking forward to getting into 2021.”
Clarke also said a big take-out from the year was that despite the addition of four new teams into the competition – Gold Coast, West Coast, St Kilda and Richmond – the standard of the competition had not slipped, but instead had increased significantly.
“We were caught on the wrong side of that improvement, but if you’re looking as just an outside observer, you’d see that the product continues to evolve and improve and the skill level’s increasing, the physicality and the capacity of the players is improving,” he said.
“The competition as a whole is in good health, and now from a club perspective our challenge is to come back up and push ourselves up to the level required.”
He said the Crows would work hard in the offseson on the fundamanetals of the game: skill execution and physicality.