David Penberthy: Criticism of Women’s AFL is rooted in male insecurity

Male criticism of AFLW is akin to schoolyard antics where boys get upset when girls are allowed to play something they regard as theirs, writes David Penberthy. The weekend’s grand final proved them all wrong.

After the extraordinary and unanticipated success of last Sunday’s AFLW grand final you would think the grumps would be silenced.

You would have to try pretty hard not to be excited and moved by this game of football. The match itself might have been one-sided, the second quarter a clinic in ruthlessness by a team that has become the benchmark in this new code. But there were two things that made the day really special.

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The first was the crowd. The spectacle of tens of thousands of people continually filing into our oval was phenomenal. Before the first bounce, the crowd itself was the talk of the crowd. You heard the same conversation everywhere. There’s definitely 30 here. Maybe even 35. They’re saying 40. They’re opening the Riverbank Stand. Far out, will you look at that?

More than 53,000 people later, South Australia had not only cemented its status as a place that rallies en masse behind good things, it had cemented the position of women’s footy as a mass, mainstream pursuit.

The second special feature of the day was, of course, the Erin Phillips story. With Port Adelaide in her DNA and the Adelaide Crows colours on her chest, Phillips is the living embodiment of our twin Aussie rules traditions in this state.

Special moment here for the National anthem as our oval hosts its first AFLW GF. Huge crowd in, at least 30k I’d guess, go you Crows pic.twitter.com/U9a3ySgc5F

— David Penberthy (@penbo) March 31, 2019

As an athlete competing in this new version of the game, she is not even close to having a peer. Seeing her fall and depart in that third term was both tragic and inspirational. The sight of her being comforted by teammates — and opponents — reduced a stadium to tears. It was hair on the back of the neck stuff, which in my life as a spectator I would compare only to the Cathy Freeman race at the Sydney Olympics.

For all this action and emotion, there remains a large number of people in this country — a crotchety but vocal minority of men — who regard the existence of the AFLW as an aberration, if not a complete outrage.

Far out pic.twitter.com/zQPP7TLllL

— David Penberthy (@penbo) March 31, 2019

John Elliott confirmed his position as Australia’s grumpy old bastard in chief by declaring on the eve of the grand final he wouldn’t watch on principle, even with the Blues there, because he regards the code as ”pathetic”. It’s wrong to dismiss Elliott as an isolated museum piece; as the Tayla Harris photo scandal demonstrated, there are plenty of young male fogeys who share his hostility, and are also happy to put their own names to their dinosaur views.

Their central criticism in a sporting sense goes to three things — skills, scores and spectators. For a code that has just celebrated its third birthday, one good way to measure its performance is against the men’s version of the game in its third season, back in 1899, when the fledgling Victorian comp was home to eight teams.

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That year’s grand final was a close-fought affair with Fitzroy holding on against South Melbourne by a point. The paltry final score: Fitzroy 3.9 (27), South Melbourne 3.8 (26), before a crowd of 4823 at the Junction Oval, where entry was apparently free.

Of the 56 matches played in the entire 1899 minor round, there were just two where a team scored more than 100 points. The biggest was at Corio Oval where Geelong kicked 16.23 (119) against St Kilda, then in the third year of their 122-year rebuilding phase, who scored just two points.

Many games were this one-sided and most were low-scoring. Round six was a shocker, with no team kicking above 35 points in any of the four games.

The reason these early blokes struggled to get big scores and attract big crowds was because the game itself was new to them.

The same is the case with AFLW, with many of the current A-grade players only recently shifting from a lifetime dedicated to other sports. Having hung up my whistle last year after four years coaching my son’s primary-school team, there was only one girl who showed an interest in playing between years four to seven, and she ultimately decided against it.

Adelaide Crows players celebrate their grand final win against Carlton. Picture: Tom Huntley

But across our schools, at the year two-three level and at Auskick, the girls are now coming through in their thousands, and will soon handle a footy in the same second-nature fashion as they can slot a netball through a hoop.

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Even with these acknowledgments that the standard of the women’s game is a work in progress, the skills and commitment shown in the second quarter of Sunday’s final were as exhilarating as anything you will see on any footy field all year, unless of course you choose to remain permanently aggrieved at the fact that women can’t kick as far as men.

If you set the debate about the quality of the sport aside, you are left with a series of gripes that have nothing to do with athleticism but are social and political in their nature.

The irony is that the male criticism of AFLW goes to perceived weakness, yet the criticism seems wholly rooted in male insecurity. At its psychological core, the bagging of AFLW is a schoolyard phenomenon, where blokes feel upset that something they regard as theirs is being spoiled by letting girls play too.

The reaction to Erin Phillips’s injury reduced a stadium to tears. Picture: Daniel Kalisz/Getty

The anxiety is no different to that felt in service clubs such as Rotary in the 1990s when the organisation finally let women join, or the angst in corporate Australia and party politics about female representation. It’s as if these guys feel like one of the last remaining all-male citadels is under siege from a feminist conspiracy.

When you examine the cruder criticisms of the code on social media, this sense of paranoia is underscored by the inordinate and derogatory discussion of the sexuality of some AFLW players, as if their lack of interest in blokes only bolsters their argument that men somehow are losers in all this.

I could not understand the negativity if I tried. The heartening thing is, as last Sunday demonstrated, nor can most of us.

Indeed the best argument for the existence of AFLW might be the daggiest male argument of all, courtesy of HG and Roy: Bring it on, because too much sport is barely enough.

@penbo

Originally published as David Penberthy: Criticism of Women’s AFL is rooted in male insecurity