Jen2310
Premium Platinum
Herald Sun article. Quite interesting, from some previous coaches.
Nathan Burke (Western Bulldogs), Daniel Harford (Carlton) and Trent Cooper (Fremantle) have all weighed in on the biggest issues facing the competition and what the AFLW needs to do to stay relevant.
‘SHOULD BE BETTER’: THE PRESENT
Seven weeks and eight games into 2024, we’ve seen the best and the worst of the AFLW.
There was Hawthorn’s frenzied win over Geelong in round 5, a game that was arguably the best spectacle in AFLW history. Then we had Friday’s snooze fest with two of the three goals kicked coming from 50m penalties.
“The competition hasn’t moved forward this year I don’t believe,” Harford said. “It might’ve stagnated. It might’ve regressed a little bit. But it hasn’t gone forward which is disappointing considering the investment of clubs and players.
“The fundamentals still aren’t good enough. Nine seasons in, I think that should be better.”
Burke and Cooper believe that the standard of the AFLW is tracking in the right direction but the gap between the best and worst teams is widening.
“The good teams used to win but they didn’t dominate like they are now,” Burke said.
The biggest factor is the continued strength of the AFLW’s ‘big three.’ Hawthorn has been the big mover this season, with all three coaches acknowledging the club’s rapid rise. But experts believe that only North Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide can win the premiership this season.
“It’s not healthy for the competition to have three teams dominating the top four,” Harford said. “The genie is out of the bottle. We’re not going back to 12 or 14 teams.”
Added Cooper: “I think most sides are 3-4 years away from genuinely challenging them. Those sides aren’t hanging on with an ageing list. They’re replenishing.”
Burke said that the AFLW’s current tiered payment system is part of the problem.
“There are maybe six players who can dedicate their lives to football,” he said. “The majority on $40,000 can’t.
“It increases the gulf between the better players and the lesser lights. How can they catch up when they also have to earn a living? We need to get rid of tiers and give each team a salary cap to be spread how they see fit.”
DECLINE IN CROWDS
Harford: “I don’t think COVID helped. I think we lost a lot of momentum. Expansion also saw a lot of inaugural players go to new clubs and that frustrated fans and then those expansion clubs took a while to find their feet. I don’t think we’ve found that sweet spot for the season and I don’t think anyone is to blame for that because they wanted to try something new and it would’ve looked like a good idea on the whiteboard."
Burke: “The venues and the times are not conducive to attracting great crowds. The AFL secretly increased the price to get into games by 50 per cent this year. In my opinion, sports supporters are creatures of habit. You work all week so on the weekend, you can go and watch your team play. We’re shooting ourselves in the foot."
Cooper: “Where the season is now, you suffer from the comparison factor. People are sometimes watching really poor AFLW games right next to a men’s final. The standard is so stark you ruin the chance of people watching again next week."
NEGATIVE COACHING TACTICS
Cooper: "Clubs are pushing a forward up to stoppages to clog up the game. That's why we've seen a few ordinary spectacle because if they do get the ball out, they’re kicking it to what looks like an outnumber. They’re actually just the defender that didn’t follow their forward up to the stoppage. Coaches obviously want to win but there’s times in a fledgling competition that how the game looks is an important consideration. And then the AFL usually tries to make rules to counter what the coaches have done."
Harford: “If you’re consciously starting two or three players behind the ball regardless of the situation, it doesn’t make any sense to me. Nobody wants to play that style of game. No talented kid who gets drafted wants to play that style. We need to be conscious of what we put out there as an entertainment product."
Burke "The skills have gone up. You can’t embed a game plan without skills. One comes before the other. Everyone involved in the game has a responsibility to make it as attractive as they can. Balancing that with winning is a tough thing to do."
THE COMPRESSED FIXTURE
Cooper: “A lot of clubs have actually handled it really well. There’s been some negative press about it but I’m not convinced some of these results are because of the compressed fixture. I wouldn’t mind them having another go at it next year to see if that was the case to see if we get some really good games and keep eyes on it while the boys are ongoing."
Harford: “I don’t know why we had a condensed fixture. I don’t know why we couldn’t start it a week earlier. But it is only a few weeks of the season and high performance teams can manage players. I don’t mind the concept of midweek footy. Maybe when we introduce the Tasmanian team and there’s a bye, there’s room for a mid-week game. I’d also love to see double-headers on Friday nights in different states and timezones."
Burke: “If a compressed fixture is lessening our product, at a time we’re really concerned about our product, then it makes sense not to do it again. Some teams have been training since as far back as January and February, doing 10km sessions. It’s no coincidence that some of them have been forced to call on top-up players because they’ve been hit by injury. Someone at the AFL needs to look at the training patterns of every team and how that correlates with injuries. We need to figure out how much training and how many games these women can sustain without breaking down and then we can grow it."
RESOURCING
Harford: “There needs to be a bigger investment in coaching. That’s not just one head coach. That’s three or four who are committing basically full-time. Part-time, casual coaches won’t enhance the product very quickly. We’re getting the player side of things right with more hours and more money. But who’s there to coach them? That conversation is always overlooked."
Burke: “Assistant coaches are getting paid bugger all. For five seasons, I had 2/3 new assistant coaches because they loved it but they couldn’t sustain it on top of their everyday jobs."
WHEN, WHERE, AND FOR HOW LONG?
Summer or winter? Suburban venues or stadiums? And how quickly can we get to 17 games?
Where the AFLW sits within the calendar year is a Pandora’s box with attendance down by more than 60 per cent in the last five years.
“Every other sport in Australia avoids AFL finals time,” Burke said. “We chuck the AFLW right in the middle.
“Then to make matters even worse, AFLW coverage is diluted by trade week. So six of the 10 weeks are saturated by the AFL’s own products. To me, it’s ridiculous.”
Burke believes the season should start during the AFL mid-season bye rounds. Cooper would like to see it return to the summer months. Harford wants the AFLW grand final to be played during the AFL pre-finals bye or preliminary final weekend.
Overlapping seasons will pave the way for more double-headers and access to AFL venues.
“Marvel should hold a footy festival every Saturday with three games back-to-back,” Burke said “That leaves six games to be played at suburban grounds.
“We play at too many grounds at too many different times. I love it and I still can’t keep up with it. How does the casual fan cope?”
There’s already a direct link between suburban venues and the standard of football.
“They’re all windswept,” Harford said. “How can you expect to have quality ball movement in conditions that are less than desirable for men’s VFL footy, let alone women’s?”
All three coaches agree a 17-game home-and-away season is non-negotiable.
“Sides make finals because of soft draws and others miss finals because of tough draws,” Cooper said. “It’s crucial for the integrity of the competition.”
‘LOST FAITH’: AN IMAGE PROBLEM
Matilda Scholz, Ella Roberts, Zarlie Goldsworthy – the AFLW’s next generation is a goldmine of football and marketing potential.
But Burke doesn’t believe the league is doing enough to promote the game.
“Is there marketing?” he said. “They made a big thing last year of the $1 million spent on the new marketing campaign ‘We The W.’
“My perspective was ‘Well, what does that mean?’ They changed the official colour of the competition to charged coral and that was going to be a breakthrough.
“We had the women’s World Cup in Australia right before our season started which Channel 7 broadcast but the AFL said ‘No we don’t want to compete with that. We’re going to avoid it.’
“We had more eyes watching women’s sport in Australia than ever before. I remember watching The Ashes and seeing NRLW ads. Ever since then, I’ve lost some faith in the AFLW marketing department.”
New general manager of women’s football Emma Moore is said to be a good operator but she’s been largely unsighted since the season got underway. All three coaches are adamant that the AFL needs to come up with a clear path forward.
“What is the elite competition supposed to look like next year in 2025 and up to 2030?” Harford said. “They’re constantly making decisions on the run and that’s not good for the competition.”
But the plan needs to be flexible.
“We’d all like a vision that we can stick to for the next 10 years but in saying that, if they’re not confident in it, they might need to keep trying and experimenting until they are,” Cooper said. “There’s no point locking in a plan if it could end up the wrong one.”
Coaches were underwhelmed by the 2030 Women’s Football Vision a wide-ranging manifesto released three years ago that focused largely on grassroots. It’s hoped that at least 50 per cent of senior coaching roles will be held by women and that AFLW players will be the best-paid sportswomen in Australia.
“I was so excited when they said they had this plan,” Burke said. “But they prefaced it by saying something like ‘I know you want to know what the future of AFLW is but this is not about AFLW. This is about women’s football. So don’t ask me questions about AFLW.’
“It was the meeting we were all hanging out for and before it even started, they burst our bubble.”
Nathan Burke (Western Bulldogs), Daniel Harford (Carlton) and Trent Cooper (Fremantle) have all weighed in on the biggest issues facing the competition and what the AFLW needs to do to stay relevant.
‘SHOULD BE BETTER’: THE PRESENT
Seven weeks and eight games into 2024, we’ve seen the best and the worst of the AFLW.
There was Hawthorn’s frenzied win over Geelong in round 5, a game that was arguably the best spectacle in AFLW history. Then we had Friday’s snooze fest with two of the three goals kicked coming from 50m penalties.
“The competition hasn’t moved forward this year I don’t believe,” Harford said. “It might’ve stagnated. It might’ve regressed a little bit. But it hasn’t gone forward which is disappointing considering the investment of clubs and players.
“The fundamentals still aren’t good enough. Nine seasons in, I think that should be better.”
Burke and Cooper believe that the standard of the AFLW is tracking in the right direction but the gap between the best and worst teams is widening.
“The good teams used to win but they didn’t dominate like they are now,” Burke said.
The biggest factor is the continued strength of the AFLW’s ‘big three.’ Hawthorn has been the big mover this season, with all three coaches acknowledging the club’s rapid rise. But experts believe that only North Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide can win the premiership this season.
“It’s not healthy for the competition to have three teams dominating the top four,” Harford said. “The genie is out of the bottle. We’re not going back to 12 or 14 teams.”
Added Cooper: “I think most sides are 3-4 years away from genuinely challenging them. Those sides aren’t hanging on with an ageing list. They’re replenishing.”
Burke said that the AFLW’s current tiered payment system is part of the problem.
“There are maybe six players who can dedicate their lives to football,” he said. “The majority on $40,000 can’t.
“It increases the gulf between the better players and the lesser lights. How can they catch up when they also have to earn a living? We need to get rid of tiers and give each team a salary cap to be spread how they see fit.”
AFLW'S OTHER ISSUES
Former coaches Nathan Burke (Western Bulldogs), Daniel Harford (Carlton) and Trent Cooper (Fremantle) have their say on other major issues facing the league.DECLINE IN CROWDS
Harford: “I don’t think COVID helped. I think we lost a lot of momentum. Expansion also saw a lot of inaugural players go to new clubs and that frustrated fans and then those expansion clubs took a while to find their feet. I don’t think we’ve found that sweet spot for the season and I don’t think anyone is to blame for that because they wanted to try something new and it would’ve looked like a good idea on the whiteboard."
Burke: “The venues and the times are not conducive to attracting great crowds. The AFL secretly increased the price to get into games by 50 per cent this year. In my opinion, sports supporters are creatures of habit. You work all week so on the weekend, you can go and watch your team play. We’re shooting ourselves in the foot."
Cooper: “Where the season is now, you suffer from the comparison factor. People are sometimes watching really poor AFLW games right next to a men’s final. The standard is so stark you ruin the chance of people watching again next week."
NEGATIVE COACHING TACTICS
Cooper: "Clubs are pushing a forward up to stoppages to clog up the game. That's why we've seen a few ordinary spectacle because if they do get the ball out, they’re kicking it to what looks like an outnumber. They’re actually just the defender that didn’t follow their forward up to the stoppage. Coaches obviously want to win but there’s times in a fledgling competition that how the game looks is an important consideration. And then the AFL usually tries to make rules to counter what the coaches have done."
Harford: “If you’re consciously starting two or three players behind the ball regardless of the situation, it doesn’t make any sense to me. Nobody wants to play that style of game. No talented kid who gets drafted wants to play that style. We need to be conscious of what we put out there as an entertainment product."
Burke "The skills have gone up. You can’t embed a game plan without skills. One comes before the other. Everyone involved in the game has a responsibility to make it as attractive as they can. Balancing that with winning is a tough thing to do."
THE COMPRESSED FIXTURE
Cooper: “A lot of clubs have actually handled it really well. There’s been some negative press about it but I’m not convinced some of these results are because of the compressed fixture. I wouldn’t mind them having another go at it next year to see if that was the case to see if we get some really good games and keep eyes on it while the boys are ongoing."
Harford: “I don’t know why we had a condensed fixture. I don’t know why we couldn’t start it a week earlier. But it is only a few weeks of the season and high performance teams can manage players. I don’t mind the concept of midweek footy. Maybe when we introduce the Tasmanian team and there’s a bye, there’s room for a mid-week game. I’d also love to see double-headers on Friday nights in different states and timezones."
Burke: “If a compressed fixture is lessening our product, at a time we’re really concerned about our product, then it makes sense not to do it again. Some teams have been training since as far back as January and February, doing 10km sessions. It’s no coincidence that some of them have been forced to call on top-up players because they’ve been hit by injury. Someone at the AFL needs to look at the training patterns of every team and how that correlates with injuries. We need to figure out how much training and how many games these women can sustain without breaking down and then we can grow it."
RESOURCING
Harford: “There needs to be a bigger investment in coaching. That’s not just one head coach. That’s three or four who are committing basically full-time. Part-time, casual coaches won’t enhance the product very quickly. We’re getting the player side of things right with more hours and more money. But who’s there to coach them? That conversation is always overlooked."
Burke: “Assistant coaches are getting paid bugger all. For five seasons, I had 2/3 new assistant coaches because they loved it but they couldn’t sustain it on top of their everyday jobs."
WHEN, WHERE, AND FOR HOW LONG?
Summer or winter? Suburban venues or stadiums? And how quickly can we get to 17 games?
Where the AFLW sits within the calendar year is a Pandora’s box with attendance down by more than 60 per cent in the last five years.
“Every other sport in Australia avoids AFL finals time,” Burke said. “We chuck the AFLW right in the middle.
“Then to make matters even worse, AFLW coverage is diluted by trade week. So six of the 10 weeks are saturated by the AFL’s own products. To me, it’s ridiculous.”
Burke believes the season should start during the AFL mid-season bye rounds. Cooper would like to see it return to the summer months. Harford wants the AFLW grand final to be played during the AFL pre-finals bye or preliminary final weekend.
Overlapping seasons will pave the way for more double-headers and access to AFL venues.
“Marvel should hold a footy festival every Saturday with three games back-to-back,” Burke said “That leaves six games to be played at suburban grounds.
“We play at too many grounds at too many different times. I love it and I still can’t keep up with it. How does the casual fan cope?”
There’s already a direct link between suburban venues and the standard of football.
“They’re all windswept,” Harford said. “How can you expect to have quality ball movement in conditions that are less than desirable for men’s VFL footy, let alone women’s?”
All three coaches agree a 17-game home-and-away season is non-negotiable.
“Sides make finals because of soft draws and others miss finals because of tough draws,” Cooper said. “It’s crucial for the integrity of the competition.”
‘LOST FAITH’: AN IMAGE PROBLEM
Matilda Scholz, Ella Roberts, Zarlie Goldsworthy – the AFLW’s next generation is a goldmine of football and marketing potential.
But Burke doesn’t believe the league is doing enough to promote the game.
“Is there marketing?” he said. “They made a big thing last year of the $1 million spent on the new marketing campaign ‘We The W.’
“My perspective was ‘Well, what does that mean?’ They changed the official colour of the competition to charged coral and that was going to be a breakthrough.
“We had the women’s World Cup in Australia right before our season started which Channel 7 broadcast but the AFL said ‘No we don’t want to compete with that. We’re going to avoid it.’
“We had more eyes watching women’s sport in Australia than ever before. I remember watching The Ashes and seeing NRLW ads. Ever since then, I’ve lost some faith in the AFLW marketing department.”
New general manager of women’s football Emma Moore is said to be a good operator but she’s been largely unsighted since the season got underway. All three coaches are adamant that the AFL needs to come up with a clear path forward.
“What is the elite competition supposed to look like next year in 2025 and up to 2030?” Harford said. “They’re constantly making decisions on the run and that’s not good for the competition.”
But the plan needs to be flexible.
“We’d all like a vision that we can stick to for the next 10 years but in saying that, if they’re not confident in it, they might need to keep trying and experimenting until they are,” Cooper said. “There’s no point locking in a plan if it could end up the wrong one.”
Coaches were underwhelmed by the 2030 Women’s Football Vision a wide-ranging manifesto released three years ago that focused largely on grassroots. It’s hoped that at least 50 per cent of senior coaching roles will be held by women and that AFLW players will be the best-paid sportswomen in Australia.
“I was so excited when they said they had this plan,” Burke said. “But they prefaced it by saying something like ‘I know you want to know what the future of AFLW is but this is not about AFLW. This is about women’s football. So don’t ask me questions about AFLW.’
“It was the meeting we were all hanging out for and before it even started, they burst our bubble.”
