Steve Price: Why female footy is substandard and doesn’t deserve focus or funding it gets from AFL
If you leave an AFLW match thinking you’ve seen a great game you’re kidding yourself, because even high school boys are better to watch.
Opinion
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Last weekend - in week five of the nine-round AFLW - one team managed a solitary point for the whole game.
The GWS women’s team were thrashed by the Adelaide Crows who kicked 15 goals. In the Tigers and Lions game in the same round the two teams kicked a combined three goals only.
If the same situation arose in the senior men’s AFL competition there would be calls for a Royal Commission.
How then, can the AFL and media justify the expense and coverage these matches are getting? And I haven’t even started on crowd numbers.
In many sports, elite women’s competition is every bit as exciting to watch as any men’s equivalent. You only need think about our national netball side the Diamonds, our world class female golfers or jockeys, and of course tennis stars.
But AFLW is not elite sport and the female version of the Australian game of football is substandard. It is not deserving of the attention and funding it gets.
The VFL, plus all men’s metropolitan and country teams are better to watch, and the standard of play is superior to AFLW.
Seniors high school boys’ football is better to watch.
While country and metropolitan football, until very recently, was starved of funding and ignored by the AFL, the women’s game has been promoted, funded and supported outrageously by an AFL pandering to political correctness and the age of equality and inclusiveness in all aspects of our lives.
It gives me no comfort to make these points, but guess what? If you honestly look at a game of AFLW and come away thinking you have seen a great game of football then you are kidding yourself.
Admission used to be free to AFLW games and still is for children but adults are now being asked to buy tickets at $10 a pop.
At a recent Collingwood and Geelong match there was a crowd of 1957 while at Metricon on the Gold Coast, in that same round, the Suns played the Eagles and only 860 people turned up.
That’s quite clearly nearly all friends, family and staff and imagine the cost to fly an AFLW team of Eagles women to Queensland to play at an almost empty stadium?
Opening up Metricon and paying ground staff and caterers for 860 people is ridiculous and embarrassing for the AFL competition and the AFL Commission.
Sadly, it’s the price you pay once you set off down the road of trying to please everyone.
This was never more obvious than the ham-fisted approach by whoever runs the women’s competition and a decision to scrap the minute’s silence to honour the Queen’s death.
A minute’s silence featured before the Western Bulldogs and Fremantle game but was dropped for the rest of the weekend because – and who would have known – the AFLW that weekend was celebrating Indigenous round.
Western Bulldogs director Belinda Duarte said during the official pre-match that “due to sorry business” a Welcome to Country was dropped.
That “sorry business” she refers to is presumably the death of the longest serving female leader in the world and the Queen of Australia, Queen Elizabeth II.
Duarte then hit out at the AFL, slammed the minute’s silence, talked about the impact of colonialism and claimed the simple action of pausing for 60 seconds to reflect on the Queen’s impact on the world “unearths deep wounds for us”.
The AFL, that proudly pointed out upon the death of Queen Elizabeth that she had attended a VFL game between Richmond and Fitzroy at the MCG in 1970, suddenly went all quiet when asked why they dropped the minute’s silence.
Pleasing all the people all the time is never easy. Sensibly one of the pioneers of women’s football — Bulldogs vice president Susan Alberti — said the league should be ashamed dropping the gesture to the memory of the Queen.
Alberti said: “As far as I am concerned, she is the most remarkable woman of my time, irrespective of politics on both sides.”
Given the men’s competition featured a minute’s silence and flags were flown at half-mast, you wonder exactly what the AFL was afraid of, and we should know the reasons behind such a panicked decision.
The AFL with its new broadcast deal has committed to funding the AFLW, and we now have a full roster of teams from each of the 18 AFL clubs. With that commitment comes a massive cost to football.
Think coaches and medical staff, change-rooms and venues and the eye-watering cost of travel, even if Virgin is a major sponsor.
As far as I am aware, the people running football have never actually given us a case for this happening, beyond that they feel it’s the right thing to do.
Was there a footballing public hankering to watch a female version of the game? A public thirst beyond the idea that women have a right to be professional AFL players just like the men?
If that push was so loud, I don’t remember hearing it. And if the AFL is so confident there is a public appetite for AFLW, then why are they not featuring the women’s matches as curtain raisers to the elite men’s competition each week as they used to do with reserves football?
More sensibly, they should quickly reduce the number of AFLW teams because clearly the talent pool is not deep enough to cater for 18 sides.
One idea maybe for a state team for WA, SA, QLD and NSW plus two from Victoria – metropolitan and regional – making it a six-team roster.
It reinvents state football and gives fans a reason to support the game.
Sadly, in my view, the AFL has rocketed down the road of political correctness in some warped view that the game needs to be part of every woke cause.
Elite female sport is every bit as good as elite men’s sport. Think Michelle Payne on Prince of Penzance winning the 2015 Melbourne Cup, Minjee Lee winning the US Women’s Open golf championship, the Matildas and the Hockeyroos or world champion swimmer Ariarne Titmus.
The list is endless. Sadly, for me AFLW is not on that list and it’s a hard thing to say.
I wish all the women playing well, but I won’t be watching.
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