AFL WOMEN’S Rankings: Round 1 SEASON 7

Essendon look to be the pick of the new teams

There are two massive changes to the AFL Women’s competition for this season. The first is that the competition has moved to winter, with “Season 7” kicking off just a few months after the previous one ended. The second is that the four remaining AFL clubs without a women’s team – Essendon, Hawthorn, Port Adelaide, and Sydney – have now joined the league, meaning that the league’s expansion is (for now) complete.

In general it has been tricky to rate these new teams coming in, although most have struggled against the more established sides (North Melbourne being the main exception). For ranking purposes I’ve tended to use the bookmaker’s odds to assign each new team an initial ranking, with the view that these should soon adapt if the strength of the new teams turns out to be significantly different to prior expectations.

Pre-season expectations however are looking to be fairly on base with regard to one team so far, namely Essendon who have built themselves a pretty handy side. They were the only new side to win on the weekend, and while that win came against another new team in Hawthorn, it was still an impressive display by the Bombers as they had 17 scoring shots and a +16 contested possession differential.

Essendon’s playing list has a good mix of both experienced AFLW and VFLW players, and quality rookies. 2020 AFLW best and fairest winner Madison Prespakis leads the midfield, while former All-Australian Jess Wuetschner and 2022 All-Australian squad member Bonnie Toogood give them reliable targets up forward. The Bombers also have some promising draft picks and players from their undefeated 2022 VFLW premiership side such as Paige Scott, Alana Barba, Danielle Marshall, and Amelia Radford.

Essendon will certainly have some tougher tests later in the season than they did on the weekend, but it was a polished performance by the Bombers in their first match.

An early trend?

One suggestion coming into this AFL Women’s season about how the switch to a winter season might change the style of play was that there may be more tackles and contests, due to the wetter and colder weather.

While it was not particularly wet on the weekend, we did see a shift to a more contested style of play, or perhaps more accurately a shift away from an uncontested one. Many teams recorded more contested than uncontested possessions in the first round, with an average ratio of 1.03 compared with 0.88 last season (see table below). However this was primarily due to a drop in the number of uncontested possessions, with contested possessions staying at similar levels. Though we might expect some of the new teams to go through some growing pains before being able to create clean chains of uncontested possessions, well-established sides such as Fremantle and Adelaide also struggled to link up. 

Was it an anomaly, some rust, or early signs of a trend for the winter months? We will know more in the weeks ahead.