Adelaide - the city and Crows women’s team - has given the AFLW a winning image in just three years
Adelaide has - as a city and as a Crows women’s team - redefined Australian football in a way that exceeds AFL boss Gillon McLachlan’s grand ambitions.
Michelangelo Rucci
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Adelaide has changed how elite women’s Australian football is seen forever. That is the team - and the city.
The Crows squad that has won two of the first three AFLW premierships (2017 and this season) has redefined that image of the women’s game being low scoring and bereft of genuine skills.
It is not just superstar Erin Phillips who can kick, mark and run with a Sherrin as if it was a genuinely natural gift. Hopefully, Adelaide’s co-captain will continue to do so after recovering from her dramatic knee injury that left an emotional mark on the grand final rather than become the AFLW’s version of AFL Legend John Coleman.
The Crows’ home-town folk have rewritten the record books for drawing a crowd to women’s football game. The 53,034 at Adelaide Oval for Sunday’s AFLW Crows-Carlton grand final rewrites the record set in Perth last year (41,975) - and the memories from 1929 at the Oval when 41,000 watched women from a city department store put on a charity match during an SANFL bye weekend.
Who would have thought it?
Fifth-largest crowd for an AFL-managed event at @TheAdelaideOval #AFLW pic.twitter.com/oQ3bmvXbHX
— michelangelo rucci (@michelangeloruc) March 31, 2019
So proud. Today was an extraordinary day. For our Club and our sport. And now we celebrate - they are pretty good at that as well! 😂 @CrowsAFLW #Premiers2019 @aflwomens pic.twitter.com/GaNf5donNo
— Andrew Fagan (@Fages1) March 31, 2019
Absolutely huge crowd at the AFLW GF! Sophie just told me one day she wants to play footy at Adelaide Oval, no doubt young girls around the nation today are equally inspired. pic.twitter.com/oFrrwttMhI
— Peter Malinauskas (@PMalinauskasMP) March 31, 2019
It is worth remembering that the AFLW was not to have started until next year, 2020. And many thought new AFL chief executive Gillon McLachlan was making his first big mistake in the big chair when ambitiously he advanced the AFLW launch by three years.
Back in his home city, McLachlan can now say his great legacy to the Australian game will be measured by women’s football rather than the dollars he generated in that $2.5 billion record television deal before replacing Andrew Demetriou in 2014.
So much has been changed forever in Australian football with the hurried birth of AFLW. “Kick like a girl” means something different since the photograph of Carlton forward Tayla Harris showing perfect technique created a social media storm. On this, inaugural Crows premiership coach Bec Goddard again proved the master of the quote in saying at the official pre-game function: “(Social media) is where losers go to feel important.”
“Run like a girl” looked picture perfect when Crows forward Stevie-Lee Thompson moved under a pass from centre from co-captain Phillips to sprint from the top of the 50-metre arc to score Adelaide’s fourth goal early in the second term.
“Play like a girl” became a different image late in the first quarter when Crows co-captain Chelsea Randall threw herself into a marking contest - with more courage than some in AFL company do.
Women’s Australian football is now an unstoppable force. McLachlan was right to go early.
michelangelo.rucci@news.com.au
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