Western Bulldogs skipper Ellie Blackburn and her team are jubilant after their upset win over Adelaide. Photo: AFL MEDIA
The biggest upset of the AFLW season, a thriller that may well be the most exciting game in the competition’s six-year history, has capped off a bizarre and bruising but highly entertaining round.
Western Bulldogs’ shock one-point win over Adelaide at Norwood, their first road win in three years, nudged the ladder-leading Crows down a rung, victorious Fremantle leapfrogging them to re-take top spot.
The Queensland sides had an eventful round, reigning premier Brisbane winning, despite wretchedly inaccurate goalkicking, while 2021 wooden spooner Gold Coast also triumphed as well as kicking its highest score.
Carlton, which saw a star fall and taken to hospital in the final term, kicked a goal in the opening minutes of its match in Fremantle, then scored just two points for the remainder.
And Greater Western Sydney came within around three minutes of not scoring at all — an indignity no VFL/AFL/AFLW club has seriously threatened in almost 125 years.
GOLD COAST 7.7 (49) d GEELONG 6.2 (38)
Punters would never have taken the odds that the Suns, after a winless, wooden-spoon 2021 campaign, would boomerang at this point of the AFLW season to within mere percentage points of a spot in the top six. Yet, here Gold Coast is, after a rousing night which saw the club kick its highest-ever score. Alison Drennan was a revelation in the red-and-gold, winning 30 possessions and laying five tackles, while zippy small forward Tori Groves-Little was electrifying, kicking two goals from five scoring shots. Lauren Bella — who with her AFLW-best hit-out total and league second-best hit-outs to advantage tally is having an All-Australian calibre year — also was brilliant, with 27 hit-outs and a goal of her own. Her ruck work was instrumental in the Suns kicking several goals from stoppages. The Cats’ Georgie Prespakis narrowly won by a whisker a highly-anticipated battle of the best first-year players, besting the Suns’ Charlie Rowbottom’s 16 touches, with a team-high 17. Geelong’s Chloe Scheer and Phoebe McWilliams led their side’s scoring, kicking two goals each, and if not for a scoreless second term, would have been in the contest the entire way. The Suns, meanwhile, are the developing side with the best shot at cracking the top six and making finals.
NORTH MELBOURNE 5.7 (37) d RICHMOND 2.6 (18)
The Roos’ two 2021 All-Australians put on quite the show at Punt Road in taming the slumping Tigers. Jasmine Garner followed her best-on-ground Round 5 performance with an encore in this match, compiling 26 possessions (12 of them contested), seven clearances, and kicking a goal, while midfielder-turned-rebounding defender Emma Kearney had 21 touches, helping bolster the Roos’ place in the top six. North’s leading ball-winner Ash Riddell, the AFLW’s leader in average possessions and likely 2022 All-Australian, had 29 touches, while the Roos’ smalls, Mia King, Daria Bannister and Sophie Abbatangelo booted goals. The silky Mon Conti again led the way for the Tigers with 25 possessions, but even when she accumulated six of those in the third term, Richmond advanced the ball into its forward end just three times, while the Roos made 12 inside 50 entries. North effectively salted away the match by three-quarter time, expanding its half-time edge from 11 to 20 points, while Richmond managed just three minor scores in the second half.
MELBOURNE 6.8 (44) d GREATER WESTERN SYDNEY 1.1 (7)
The Giants came painstakingly close to breaking a VFL/AFL record that has stood since 1899 — for inability, not prowess. Until two minutes and 49 seconds were left in this game, the Giants’ score was … donuts. St Kilda’s men in that 1899 contest scored just one point, as Geelong obliterated them with a 23.24 (162) scoreline. By the time GWS’ Jess Doyle goalled at the late final term juncture, the issue had long been decided. The Dees’ continued their Casey Fields dominance, winning their 11th straight match on their home soil. For the Giants, it’s the second time this season they’ve failed to score in the first half — their other bout of futility came against North Melbourne. Melbourne’s Lily Mithen, Karen Paxman, and Tyla Hanks all gathered more than 20 possessions and brilliantly set up attacks, while Eliza West (20 touches, six clearances, and seven tackles) shined especially bright. Even as the Dees had a run of inaccuracy in the third term, kicking five behinds, the dangerous Tayla Harris righted the ship in the last, kicking her ninth and 10th goals of the season.
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FREMANTLE 7.9 (51) d CARLTON 1.3 (9)
The prodigal daughter Dockers returned to their home port and though they were stuck in the doldrums in the first term, they awoke to smash the free-falling Blues, riding a four-goal second, including two by first-year jet Mikayla Morrison, who kicked three majors on the day and likely will earn a Rising Star nomination for her performance. While Hayley Miller and Gabby O’Sullivan led the ball-winning charge, with 24 and 19 respectively, the talk of this match revolved around the smooth-moving Morrison, who besides her goals, gobbled up 13 possessions (six contested) and laid five tackles. The Blues’ Darcy Vescio won a first quarter battle against Fremantle defender Jessica Low, gathering five touches, snapping a goal, and firing off two other shots for minor scores. Low, however, decisively won the war, as Vescio collected just one touch the rest of the match. It’s now the third straight match Vescio has been limited to under 10 disposals, while the Blues scored just one point after the first term. Carlton, which has conceded the most points in AFLW, gave up 25 in the third quarter, but took its biggest hit in the final term when Fremantle’s Gemma Houghton flew for a mark and her knee caught Blues’ star Maddy Prespakis in the back. Prespakis had to be escorted off the ground in the hands of trainers and was then taken to hospital for examination, leaving the club to sweat on test results.
BRISBANE 3.13 (31) d ST KILDA 4.2 (26)
A win’s a win, of course, but for the Lions, they’ll likely sheepishly look back at this victory more as an escape than anything else. How else could they view it after kicking 11 straight behinds until finally booting a major with eight minutes left in the third term? Luka Yoshida-Martin, a debutant, stopped the rot for Brisbane, poking through a crumb, which gave her side a narrow lead. Goalsneak Greta Bodey quickly followed Yoshida-Martin’s example with her own left-foot snap, but the Lions’ last major came at great cost. Dakota Davidson won a free kick for getting taken high, but the resultant head knock she suffered made her too wobbly to line up for her set shot. Trainers escorted Davidson off the ground, while Sophie Conway — despite two other players appearing to be closer to the mark — took and converted the free, giving the Lions a commanding 16-point lead. The Saints though, who remain winless, didn’t give up and in the final term whittled the deficit down to three points, thanks to goals by Tilly Lucas-Rodd (20 touches) and Caitlin Greiser. The Lions’ Orla O’Dwyer (18 disposals) and Emily Bates (17 disposals) won the ball just enough to keep the ball in their forward end to get them over the line, especially in the third term, when their side amassed 15 inside 50s to none. The Lions’ 13 behinds, incidentally, was just one shy of equalling the AFLW record of 14, which was registered by the Doggies in 2018 and Giants in 2020.
COLLINGWOOD 7.4 (46) d WEST COAST 3.4 (22)
In just one quarter of football, the Magpies equalled their total number of goals — two — from the last two rounds. In a portent of things to come, Chloe Molloy, who to this point had only kicked two majors for the season — both in a win over Geelong — opened the Pies’ scoring with a goal. She would go on to add another, while gathering 18 possessions (11 contested) and winning four clearances. Molloy’s teammate Britt Bonnicci won more of the ball than anyone else, stockpiling 27 possessions (16 contested) and kicking a fourth quarter goal. Of course, it wouldn’t be a 2022 Magpies women’s match without the opposition gifting them a goal or two by giving away free kicks for undisciplined acts and in the third term, the Eagles twice obliged Collingwood. In a third quarter which proved to be West Coast’s undoing, in a matter of minutes, Niamh Kelly, then Imahra Cameron both conceded 50-metre penalties, resulting in easy set shots Collingwood converted. In a bad omen at the start of the term, after winning a centre clearance, Eagle Isabella Lewis, playing on Bonnici, uncorked a 30-metre bomb — to the wrong end of the ground. Eagles Dana Hooker and Emma Swanson contributed 21 and 19 touches, respectively, and Hooker and Cameron would both kick fourth goals, but by the time they did, with their club down 31 points at three-quarter time, it was too little, too late.
WESTERN BULLDOGS 8.1 (49) d ADELAIDE 7.6 (48)
An incredibly tense, edge-of-the-seat finish in which the Bulldogs held on by their collective fingernails in denying the Crows the solitary point that would have forced a draw, belied a beginning which was a totally unexpected Doggies’ ambush. They won clearance after clearance, piled on immense pressure, and took the game on with bold ball movement. Before the Crows knew what bit them and made their first foray inside 50, the Dogs’ Bonnie Toogood, Nell Morris-Dalton, and Richelle Cranston had all goalled. By the major break, with their captain Ellie Blackburn leading the way with 16 touches and a goal, the Dogs, with a 6.1 (37) tally, had already kicked their highest season total — the most points the Crows’ women ever have conceded in a first half — and established a healthy 17-point lead. Yet, despite the heroics of Toogood (two goals), Blackburn, (23 touches, five clearances, three tackles) and Kirsty Lamb (17 touches, four clearances), the Crows mounted a grandstand finish to get within one point after being down 15 points at three-quarter time. Ebony Marinoff and Anne Hatchard, Adelaide’s two most reliable ball-winners, had 27 and 22 touches respectively, Ashleigh Woodland booted two goals to extend her league lead to 12, and superstar Erin Phillips lifted in the final term, seeming to will her side to victory. But even after the umpire controversially paid Phillips a mark inside 50 that replays showed she never completely controlled, she missed the resultant set-shot, setting up a series of stoppages near the goal square. The Bulldogs held their nerve for the last 90 seconds and didn’t allow a score, to hand Adelaide its first loss of the season. The Dogs’ victory was a touch bittersweet. The already injury-ravaged side ground out most of the match down two players – Aurora Smith, making her AFLW debut, was felled by a serious knee injury just three minutes into the game, while Brooke Lochland was concussed after taking friendly fire from Toogood.
