Happy footy day, mates! After a long and largely uneventful off-season, we call finally bask in the sheer and utter joy of leather poisoning, with tonight marking the kickoff of the AFLW‘s second-ever season.
Season 2018 for the nation’s elite women’s competition begins tonight, with a repeat of last year’s enormous and historic clash between Carlton and Collingwood at the hallowed Princes Park stadium in suburban Melbourne.
What does this year have in store? Will reigning premiers the Adelaide Crows be able to complete a history-making back-to-back triumph? Will the Brisbane Lions avenge a heartbreaking Grand Final loss? Or will a team from Melbourne, footy’s heartland, stake their claim?
Folks, we have gazed into the crystal ball, and we have seen the future. Behold, our entirely serious and very normal predictions for the 2018 AFLW season.
ERIN PHILLIPS DECLARES OPEN SEASON ON ROOKIES
Last year, everyone was a rookie. First ever season of the AFLW. Everyone on more or less the same page. This year, however, things are different. With the first batch of new draftees entering the system, the league is in dire need of a grizzled, battle-hardened veteran. One who’ll mow down a first gamer without so much as blinking, kick dirt on their face and sneer “welcome to the AFLW, asshole.” And who better to fill that role than dual-sport champion and inaugural AFLW Best & Fairest Erin Phillips?
Phillips is, after all, the inaugural AFLW league Best & Fairest and the current co-holder of the AFLW games record. Sure, that record is 8 games and it’s held by about 30 other players. But it’s 8 more games than any of the punk-ass rookies coming in this year have. Experience is experience.
AFTER A PLAYER RUNS SO HARD INTO A PACK THEY CRACK THEIR SKULL, BARRY FROM CARRUM DOWNS – AGE 53 – ADMITS THE WOMEN’S GAME IS “NOT BAD”
As an incredibly physical season with hits way harder than anyone getting paid that little should either be throwing or taking concludes, a sickening clash between two players hell-bent on gathering a loose ball puts one in hospital with a cracked skull; a horrible injury by anyone’s estimation.
Catching the incident out of the corner of his eye as he huffs and stomps past the lounge room in protest of “the sheilas” being on the TV for the fifth time today, Carrum Downs resident Barry manages to stifle how impressed he suddenly is by grunting and murmuring “hmm, not bad,” in a statement that will earn him mass constant and thorough ridicule from his equally shitful mates.
CONSPIRACY THEORISTS GO BANANAS AFTER DARCY VESCIO RUNS SO FAST SHE LEAVES A VAPOR TRAIL
In front of a packed out crowd of 25,000+ at Princes Park, Carlton’s resident jet Darcy Vescio shows off what a full pre-season in a professional AFL-style system can achieve by taking off on a run through the midfield so fast that her feet create a vapor trail.
The 5-second incident will attract mainstream media attention for approximately half a news cycle, and will provide enough fuel for conspiracy theorists to produce 42,560 hours of truly insane YouTube footage.
GABBA GROUNDSTAFF FINALLY CONCEDE BY ALLOWING THE BRISBANE WOMEN TO PLAY IN THE CAR PARK
You can’t just wear the backlash from an absurd situation like preventing the Brisbane Lions from hosting a home Grand Final in actual Brisbane because there was an Adele concert on the ground within a calendar year of the planned game date and the grass had to recover and expect to get away with it.
After a brutal series of negotiations with the stubborn groundstaff who very much wish football didn’t exist at all much less football in *February*, women’s football in Queensland scores a monumental coup by being allowed, for the very first time, to step foot onto the surface of the Gabba… car park. Seems the equality movement hasn’t quite reached professional horticulture just yet.
TAYLA HARRIS BAFFLES ASTROPHYSICISTS BY ACTUALLY KICKING SOMEONE’S HEAD INTO THE SUN
Remember this insanely good tweet from last year?
When I die I hope it’s because Tayla Harris kicked me head off into the sun pic.twitter.com/UHVSr5zfY2
— (scattered boos) (@UberEats_AU) February 12, 2017
In season 2018, the most perfect kicking action in the land proves her hamstring tendons have only strengthened over the off season, and Tayla Harris winds up accidentally kicking the head off of someone diving in an attempt to smother. She kicks it so hard, in fact, that it achieves escape velocity and bursts out of the stratosphere. NASA scientists, baffled by this development, dedicate careers and lives to studying the propulsion generated by one apparently human leg, and Harris suddenly finds herself rich beyond her wildest dreams thanks to a string of insanely horny men with particularly intense foot fetishes.
LYGON STREET MOB BOSSES DONATE SCISSOR LIFTS FROM THEIR TOTALLY LEGITIMATE CONSTRUCTION BUSINESSES TO ALLOW MORE PEOPLE TO VIEW THE SEASON OPENER AT PRINCES PARK
With Princes Park full to bursting at last year’s inaugural season opener, a very sweaty Gillon McLachlan struts out to the gates of the ground at tonight’s game and announces that, despite the fact the ground was at capacity some 3 hours before kickoff, more people will be now able to view the game.
Additionally, he stammers through announcing that this is all thanks to the very generous donation of scissor lifts from local Carlton-area legitimate businessmen, who persuaded him to accept their help totally voluntarily, and not at all because they have compromising photos of him, a copy of the latest broadcast rights agreement, and an extra large bottle of fine virgin olive oil. Be a shame if someone were to release those hypothetical photos, after all.
SEVEN ANNOUNCES REPLACEMENT PROGRAM FOR AFLW ON MAIN CHANNEL, ‘PLANKING FAILS MAKE YOU LAUGH OUT LOUD‘
After Channel Seven, in their infinite wisdom, decided to shift the bulk of their AFLW broadcasts to sub-channel 7Mate, station bosses suddenly find themselves with a giant gaping hole in their planned prime-time schedule on the main channel.
Going back to the previous well of throwing a series of loosely cut together YouTube clips and plugging into the hole like the broadcasting equivalent of No More Gaps, Seven bosses decide it’s high time we all got on board with the hottest craze of Q1 2008, planking. A whole hour of nothing but people trying to plank and not being able to do so, beamed around the country to your TV. Unsurprisingly, the AFLW whips its ass in the ratings, prompting no changes to be made.
DAISY PEARCE PULLS DOUBLE DUTY BY PROVIDING LIVE COMMENTARY WHILE PLAYING
Just because there’s that little thing to worry about like the season being back, doesn’t mean that Melbourne captain Daisy Pearce is going to shirk her media duties to Channel Seven. So she grabs a wireless mic from the production truck, straps it to herself and patches into the broadcast feed, and pulls the mother of all double duties by providing live play-by-play commentary and expert analysis while carving her way through opposition half back lines.
And she makes it look easy too, because there ain’t a dang thing Daisy Pearce can’t do.
THE ENTIRE AFLW CONTINUES TO BE TOTALLY BLOODY AWESOME
You know it’s true. The first-ever women’s season was insanely good, both from an entertainment and a quality standpoint. And that’s only gonna get better this year.
Can you smell it, mates? Footy’s back. Footy’s finally back. Hell, it’s written in the sky today in Melbourne.
You reckon people are pumped for the @aflwomens season opener tonight!? pic.twitter.com/PFkO9p86rn
— AFL Nation (@AFLNation) February 2, 2018
Fucken hell it’s gonna be good.
Peep all the vital details about the 2018 AFLW season, which begins tonight at 7:30, over at the league’s official website.
