It's either a fair dinkum competition or it's entertainment.
If it's entertainment then why bother with drafts, trades and coaches, etc., etc. That would be making just a womens version of the little league!
Carlton is coping some blame in the media courtesy of Maguire's mob, but the Collingwood assistant coach has already come out and stated both clubs were to blame for defensive tactics. And that is natural given the state of player development.
As I've already stated in earlier posts, the first part of "The game" that gets better when fitness and strength are sorted is tagging and defense. Eventually the attacking players will learn to deal with tags and zones, but at the moment they have never experienced anything like it.
At the weekend Collingwoods forward moves were mindless with them often bombing the ball from the HFF instead of working their way through the zone. The only different between Carlton's zone and Collingwoods zone was that ours setup at CHB while the Collingwood zone setup across the midfield. We ended up with play mostly between the arcs.
Another part of the problem at the weekend was the slow adjudication of things like the new Last Touch Rule. I cannot see why it's isn't just played to advantage like any other free, but the dealt it out like it was a mark and forced players to go back and kick over the mark from outside the boundary preventing play on!
PS; It's moronic to think that high scoring is the only entertaining part of AFL, the pressure the girls applied last weekend compared to last season was enormous. It just goes to show you how shallow some people think, I bet some of the same people watch EPL and think it's great!
Who could forget a few years ago when Gibbs started a brawl with the bombers on the siren then Mitch Robinson came into back him up and Bryce jogged off to let him fight them on his own?
Should have traded the man bun back then.
Robinson, how good would it be to have him besides ACoS at the moment giving these kids some cover!
Rhetorically, why did Malthouse kibosh Robinson yet allow players like Didak, Shaw, Swan, Thomas and Beams stay at Collingwood, didn't they all lie to the coach at some stage?
Nothing better than standing in the crowd at the footy and listening to sad old drunken bastards describe how they'd like to boof your mate's teenage daughter!
This was the main reason 2012 was so embarrassing.
Think back to the St. Kilda game where they went after ED curnow and ended his game. Then they smashed Carrazzo, and later on Murphy copped the same treatment.
Do the same to Richmond. Smash the little twerps into the ground!!
Tough to do that when your captain or better players have three opponents working them over and your team-mate in Tuohy or Henderson jogs past with an invisibility cloak on! ACoS and a couple of the younger guys Macreadie, Wettering, Ploiwman and Williamson are rapidly fixing this problem, but good riddance to those piddly players we've "lost"!
We still have a couple of Tarzan's who play like Jane, guys who happily jump all over someone's back but miraculously always find themselves out of the contest when the ball comes in slow and high with them in front. Thankfully, their ranks are rapidly thinning! There is nothing more disheartening for a team than having one of the giants wearing a Tom-Thumb heart!
I think that is normal, when you are the Carlton of recent times you don't put your limited available attacking weapons on guard duty.
We don't have enough experienced attacking talent to leave the ones we do have tagging!
Malthouse went tag crazy in the end, a sign he had lost it, his whole plan was stop him, stop him, stop him, stop him, stop him, etc., etc., etc., leaving the possibility of a win to dumb luck. While it's true you have to stop the opposition scoring to win, you still must score yourself!
The league's best player last season was a basketballer.
Our best player was a goalkeeper.
Imagine how good they would have been if they had focused on footy their whole lives?
Yes, no doubt that will be the case!
Also the massive rise in fitness and physicality has, as Lods points out, greatly increased pressure acts on field. At the moment the girls are playing catch up in terms of decision making and experience. They are all now fit enough to get to the contest and influence the disposal, but they are not experienced at playing under such pressure. The tell for me is how many of them are still goal orientated, they still try to pick up the pill and head straight through a wall of opponents for goal.
If you want to judge how much they have improved, it will probably show when their normal state level season starts later this year and the fitness and talent is spread across many teams.
Voting for the Hosking's can be a curly one, the commentators frequently called the wrong name when numbers were obscured despite the tell-tale shoulder strapping Jess wore which should have made the identification unmistakable.
The naysayers are founding their arguments based on what women do relative to men, it's pointless.
They don't get that the AFLW is a totally different game, so comparisons with AFL are pointless.
Like comparing Go-Karts to F1. They can race on the same track with the same priorities, rules and a similar skill set but that is where the comparison ends. Yet you can easily understand and respect both sports. Why is it so hard for some to accept females playing football, that seems to be the issue underlying many negative posts!
