AFLW waiting game may not be so bad for Port Adelaide, especially as it continues China commitment
AFLW continues to defy those who argued women’s football would be a short-lived novelty event. But Port Adelaide should not lament being second to the big show – again – writes Michelangelo Rucci.
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Some boats are worth missing, as the ocean floors prove.
Port Adelaide opted – or rather was forced by the AFL – to stay on the slow boat to China rather than be part of Australia’s fastest-growing sport, national women’s Australian football (AFLW).
History indeed repeats. As it was with the club’s AFL dream that became a nightmare for all in 1990.
Port Adelaide again will wait as many as seven years to have duplicity in the big league.
It has watched the in-town rival, the one that took its spot in the AFL (and possibly AFLW), win two national men’s premierships (1997 and 1998) – and do the same in the women’s league (2017 and 2019).
Amazing coincidence.
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But at least after the 1990 saga Port Adelaide still had the SANFL as a base for building its eventual AFL program, a critical advantage notes the club’s first AFL chief executive, Brian Cunningham.
Not so with the AFLW, a raw nerve that agitated Port Adelaide president David Koch last month as he answered his club members’ questions on securing an AFLW licence ... and whether his club had erred in putting China first.
Meanwhile, rivals such as Hawthorn – as with recent AFLW entries from St Kilda and Richmond – is preparing a strong women’s football program in the VFLW.
In Hawthorn’s case, the lead-up is top notch with the appointment of AFLW inaugural premiership coach Bec Goddard as the club’s VFLW coach.
But sometimes being at the end of the queue is not a disaster, particularly in a league with immense growing pains.
In the AFL, the expansion franchise with the best talent base – and thereby a grand chance to maintain sustained top-eight finals campaigns – is the last entry, Greater Western Sydney.
The Giants’ recruiting concessions – that have been extended with strategic conversion of excess talent for first-round draft picks in the trade period – remain without peer.
Be it 2022 or 2023 when Port Adelaide gets an AFLW licence, there will be a recruiting whiteboard at Alberton with a long list of young women with broader skill bases than there was at the AFLW start in 2017.
The SANFL is reluctant to endorse a Port Adelaide state league women’s team when the AFL club might be committed to no more than a short-term stay in the SANFLW.
This might change – with a provisional place in the SANFLW – when Port Adelaide gets clarity on its AFLW entry date.
In the meantime, the SANFL argues the best way it can help Port Adelaide’s AFLW ambitions is in developing local talent.
More so when Port Adelaide’s inaugural AFLW squad will need to load up on SA-based players in a league still well short of financial incentives to encourage interstate recruiting drives to mirror those by the Power in its formative AFL years from 1997.
In the 1990s, it was clear why Port Adelaide wanted to be in the AFL.
Today, is the desire for an AFLW licence about a “want” or a “need”?
Is it about wanting to have everything the Crows have, even though the majority of Port Adelaide fans do not watch AFLW?
Envy is a curse.
Or is it about needing the new market – and the sponsorship opportunities – presented in a new league with a distinctly different supporter base.
After four years, it is clearer that many AFLW fans are not necessarily devoted to men’s football – and many commercial houses appreciate this new sporting audience.
Generally, being second in the market is not ideal.
But in the AFLW context, Port Adelaide might find the waiting game is not the opportunity missed as many – such as former state treasurer Tom Koutsantonis – would have it.
As in 1990, that winter of high drama that changed the SA football landscape with the AFL expanding its footprint to Adelaide, there is still much mystery as to just what did happen when AFL boss Gillon McLachlan opted to advance the AFLW from a 2020 start to 2017.
It is highly unlikely that soon-to-depart Port Adelaide chief executive Keith Thomas will follow 1990 SANFL president Max Basheer in leaving a tell-all autobiography (to be released when he has died).
And it is just as unlikely that history will remember how a Channel 9 sports report – in particular, the interview with Crows football boss David Noble – ensured Adelaide, the city and club, was not left out of the AFLW in 2017.
Like China, the AFLW is a long game.
If Port Adelaide has realism in China, it also needs patience with the AFLW that has its best days still to come.
Originally published as AFLW waiting game may not be so bad for Port Adelaide, especially as it continues China commitment