Brisbane teammates get around Orla O’Dwyer after she kicked a crucial goal in the preliminary final. Photo: GETTY IMAGES
The cream has once again officially risen to the top with a rematch of the AFLW’s inaugural 2017 grand final between Adelaide and Brisbane the showpiece of the 2021 season next Saturday.
This time the two sides will square off in South Australia rather than Queensland, where the first flag decider was held, and Adelaide Oval will be the battleground, as it was when the Crows defeated Carlton in 2019.
The powerhouse Crows continued their recent dominance of their foes, cruising past Melbourne by 18 points, while the resilient Lions outlasted a tough opponent in Collingwood in searing heat and humidity to hang on by four points.
The result is that two best teams all season have a desired date with destiny. And Brisbane, despite having finished runner-up in its first two grand finals, is every chance of making it third time lucky, even as underdog and away from home.
As 34-year-old Lion Lauren Arnell put it after her team’s nail-biting victory: “We don’t have any superstars. We’re an even group of girls who really care about each other.” Seldom has a game of women’s football been as eagerly anticipated as will be the premiership decider in what has been a magnificent AFLW season.
ADELAIDE 5.8 (33) d MELBOURNE 1.9 (15)
Two weeks ago, Adelaide crashed the finals party by barging its way to the top of the ladder in the last weekend of the home-and-away season. Now, through their emphatic preliminary final victory, the Crows are, for the second time in the last three completed seasons, AFLW grand final party hostesses.
Fittingly, it was Adelaide’s Ebony Marinoff outdoing her own 2019 preliminary final performance by tying teammate Anne Hatchard’s 35-touch, single-match record. Eighteen of Marinoff’s possessions were contested and she added 13 tackles – both numbers a testament to Adelaide’s hardness at the ball.
For her part, Hatchard racked up 27 touches of her own and effectively slammed the door shut on Melbourne’s hopes with a late, third-term snap.
From the opening siren, Adelaide frustrated Melbourne with intense pressure on any Demon who got near the ball. The Dees actually had 11 inside 50s in the first term, paced by Karen Paxman’s nine possessions and Tyla Hanks’s seven, yet managed only two behinds. That pair continued to grind it out, finishing with 25 and 23 disposals respectively.
Melbourne’s Brenna Tarrant missed a crucial snap from no more than two metres out, hitting the post. The final term was eerily similar, as the Dees tried to mount a gallant fightback from a 21-point, three-quarter time deficit.
Melbourne peppered the goals, but only Kate Hore kicked a major, to go with four behinds. Shelley Scott consistently took strong marks inside 50 for Melbourne, but too often appeared to be the Dees’ only avenue to goal.
The Crows dominated the second and third quarters, holding Melbourne to just three behinds. Crows’ spark plug Rachelle Martin won a heap of her nine contested possessions in the third term, helping set up both Chloe Scheer with a kick, and Hatchard with pressure, to kick goals within a minute of each other.
For Scheer, who missed nearly 700 days of competition after rupturing an anterior cruciate ligament late in her club’s 2019 grand final win, her goal was especially sweet.
Not surprisingly, Adelaide superstar Erin Phillips – a two-time AFLW best and fairest winner – again shone in the spotlight, kicking two goals.
Adelaide’s quest for a third flag, though, will be a bit bittersweet. Captain Chelsea Randall suffered a concussion in a first-term head clash with Melbourne’s Eliza McNamara. Both players took no further part in the match and the AFLW’s mandatory 12-day layoff after concussion rule will almost certainly rule Randall out of the biggest game of the season.
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BRISBANE 7.3 (45) d COLLINGWOOD 6.5 (41)
If Lion Dakota Davidson were ever to write a self-help book, she should call it “Instant Self-Redemption”.
It was nearly midway through the final term, with a grand final berth on the line and Davidson, who gathered a loose ball, had an open look at goal. Instead of getting a running start and aiming high, Davidson blasted it straight into Collingwood defender Stacey Livingstone’s chest.
But as if the footy goddesses divinely granted Davidson a second chance, she marked a Tahlia Hickey kick just 30 seconds later and this time made no mistake, hammering home a set shot from 35 metres out to give her side a lead it would not relinquish, and more importantly, a berth in its third grand final.
Davidson’s goal was her third of the day, in a thrilling, see-sawing match that saw five lead changes and had the Pies banging on the door after an Ashleigh Brazill snap with just 21 seconds left.
It was a match marked by fierce individual battles all over the ground: Livingstone v Davidson; the Lions’ Cathy Svarc v the Pies’ Brianna Davey; and Collingwood’s Chloe Molloy v Brisbane’s Breanna Koenen.
Collingwood co-captain Davey, the comp’s leading ball-winner, gathered 23 touches – just a shade below her average – but wasn’t influential enough to drag her side over the line. Molloy, the goalsneak, was held to five touches for the match and couldn’t fire a single scoring shot.
The Lions’ smart team defence prevented the Pies from executing their patented run-and-carry and handball chains, forcing them into long kicks to work their way inside their forward 50.
The match wasn’t without a controversial umpiring non-decision and a bizarre bounce of the ball. The Pies built an eight-point quarter-time lead and in the second term, Collingwood’s Tarni Brown clearly appeared to have run several steps too far before snapping truly, but the umpires didn’t blow their whistles.
Later in the same term, the Pies’ Sarah Rowe’s snap looked on its way to bounce through the goal square, only for it to carom backward into the forward pocket and stay in play, helping Brisbane preserve a 10-point half time lead it had built.
The Lions had three unsung heroes also helping them to victory: leading ball-winner Alexandra Anderson gathered 23 possessions, Greta Bodey kicked two goals from eight touches and laid eight tackles, and Orla O’Dwyer (11 touches) provided vital run and carry all day from the wing.
