Football grand finals are emotional affairs. They occupy a place in your heart forever if your team wins, but are often buried deep down if you lose. They offer inspirational highlights reels and montages set to moving music that bring tears to your eyes. But few grand finals can claim to have the immense cultural impact that Sunday’s AFLW decider will have, not just on the fledging code as it concluded its third season, but on the greater Australian sporting landscape.
A record-breaking 53,034 fans piled into Adelaide Oval – this broke not only the attendance record for women’s Australian rules football but the record for any standalone women’s sporting event in Australia.
The previous record for women’s football was claimed by Perth’s Optus Stadium in 2018 with 41,975 punters attending the new stadium’s first ever match between Fremantle and Collingwood. Before last year’s match the record of 41,000 was held by a match played in Adelaide Oval in 1929.
Breaking this record was an incredibly emotional experience for many who have followed the last three seasons of the AFLW competition and watched it grow. But also to those who have also been following women’s football their whole lives. Those who always knew women’s football deserved a national competition.
Social media lit up in the best way when the number was confirmed. Twitter was full of people celebrating and amplifying the message that when you give women’s sport a platform and a place – fans follow. For every woman who was told “no” when they asked to play the game, when they asked for better facilities for their local women’s teams or when they asked to be paid as professional athletes, yesterday, there were 53,034 people who said “yes”.
Adelaide went into the match clear favourites, finishing top of the Conference A table and two games clear of Conference B leaders Carlton. But after the Blues’ impressive defeat of Fremantle in the preliminary final, and their rallying around Tayla Harris after a horrific experience of online harassment, no one wanted to write them off.
Despite Carlton’s best efforts, Adelaide already looked comfortably in control of the game by halfway through the second quarter. But this did not ease the emotional day that fans of women’s football would endure as the game went on.
When Adelaide young gun, Chloe Scheer went down clutching her right knee with seven minutes to go in the second quarter, the worst was thought to have happened that day. The pick 37 in the 2018 AFLW draft had played a marvellous debut season and was firing up for the match, having just taken an excellent mark over Carlton’s Kerryn Harrington. Scheer’s backstory made fans fear for her football future as she was primed to be drafted in 2017 before rupturing her ACL late in the season. It indeed looked like she’d done it again. If only the fans knew what was to come.
The hearts of the women’s football community collectively broke when arguably the league’s best player, Erin Phillips, went down with four minutes to go in the third term. Social media was again flooded, this time with tweets and posts that contained the phrase, “Please, no”, as Phillips painfully grabbed at her left knee, her good knee, on the grass.
Phillips had been sensational. She’d kicked two goals, had 18 disposals and was influencing all aspects of the game through her stellar on-field leadership. As she was stretchered off the ground, the thunderous chorus of 53,034 cheered the competition’s most well regarded, respected and revered hero. It would have been hard to find a dry eye at Adelaide Oval, or around the country watching on as Phillips was approached by both her team mates and opponents, wishing her well as she exited the game in the most unfair way.
With two minutes to go in the game, Phillips emerged from the rooms on crutches to celebrate the finals moments of the game with her soon to be victorious Crows and the record-breaking crowd, who erupted at the sight of her.
Adelaide won the 2019 grand final by 45 points. They won it for Phillips, they won it for Scheer. They won it for Rhiannon Metcalfe and Jasmyn Hewett whose injuries put the number one ruck job in Jessica Foley’s inexperienced but extraordinarily talented hands. They won it for all their teammates who weren’t on the park that day. They won it for all the women who had never been given the chance to get there in the first place. They won it for 53,034 fans at Adelaide Oval and thousands more watching on. And they won it with all of them.
For if anything, the AFL women’s competition is more than just teams playing against each other chasing a premiership. It is a community who comes together to celebrate and elevate each other. It’s a movement for social change and on Sunday that movement made a record-breaking statement.
Despite only playing two and a half quarters, the best on ground for the 2019 decider went to Phillips. Her injury, though devastating, will be remembered as the moment that a record-breaking crowd of people came together to watch women play football and showed them the support, compassion and respect that all female athletes deserve.
This grand final will go down in the history books as one of the most important events in our nation’s sporting history. And the highlights reel will most certainly have us all reaching for the tissues.
