A Port Adelaide team playing in September. Sounds right.
A Port Adelaide team playing for national league honours on the club's spiritual home at Alberton Oval. Sounds perfect.
The moment has arrived. History, or rather "herstory", is made from 1.10pm on Saturday, September 3 when Lauren Arnell's "inaugurals" play the AFLW's inaugurals of the Western Bulldogs at Alberton Oval.
More than a century has passed since the Port Adelaide senior men's team, playing in the fourth season of the new South Australian Football Association (now SANFL), stepped on Alberton Oval for the first time to play for points.
History does repeat ...
Port Adelaide opened the 1880 SAFA season on the road, losing by two goals to Norwood at the East Parklands. Port Adelaide's AFLW team lost its first game for points on the road - by two goals - to West Coast at Mineral ResourcesPark in Perth.
Port Adelaide beat Kensington - 1.7 (with the goal the only official score) to 0 - on Saturday, May 15, 1880 in the club's first championship match at Alberton Oval. Port Adelaide plays the Western Bulldogs in its first AFLW home game at Alberton Oval on Saturday, September 3, 2022.
Against this history, there is "herstory" is in the making ... and the club's 152-year story in the remaking.
FAST AND FURIOUS
PORT Adelaide plays hard - and will be furious from how it let slip the chance to open its AFLW story seven days earlier with a win against West Coast in Perth.
The Western Bulldogs play fast with their ball movement, particularly by foot.
Put these two themes on Alberton Oval for the first AFLW game played at home for Port Adelaide - with a passionate crowd at the club's spiritual home - and there is the prospect of a match that will be remembered well beyond the Port Adelaide Football Club's history vault.
The Western Bulldogs know they are stepping into a hotbed of Port Adelaide passion. And they are quite used to dealing with hostile environments, as they proved in Season 6 with their last trip to Adelaide ending in a one-point victory - the only win scored against the eventual AFLW premier by a visiting team in South Australia.
As with all Australian football games today, the test is of the midfields. Port Adelaide is quickly building an engine room that will be seen as far more than captain and AFLW champion Erin Phillips. Brisbane recruit Maria Moloney is living up to this task.
"Maria (Moloney) is the epitome of resilience - and team. She sets a standard. She did that last week on field. Every day she sets a standard off field. She is professional in every sense. I was fortunate enough to play along side her at Brisbane. I knew she would be important in building culture at our club.
"To give Maria the opportunity to perform - and she has been preparing for this opportunity for years (while sitting in reserve at Brisbane) - is another beautiful thing about AFLW expansion."
Port Adelaide senior coach Lauren Arnell
LESSONS LEARNED
PORT ADELAIDE was good for so much of the AFLW season-opener against West Coast at Mineral Resources Park in Perth on Saturday ... but not for long enough to ensure an 11-point lead at three quarter-time held up. Instead, there was a two-goal loss - and lesson on how straying from the "Port Adelaide way" of contested football comes at a price.
Playing at home - for the first time in front of fans who want their own first impressions of this latest Port Adelaide senior team - brings it owns expectations.
The experienced opponent, the Western Bulldogs, brings the challenge of staying in the contest - and hard at the contest - for longer.
Everything that is demanding, perhaps even confronting, from the review of the West Coast match comes into play on Saturday afternoon. Moment. Opponent. Opportunity.
"We pick up the learnings. We move on," Port Adelaide senior coach Lauren Arnell says.
"We look at what wins us games - that is (forcing) turnovers and (winning) contests. We look at how we want to exit defensive 50 under pressure. We gave up the ball in bad spots - and West Coast burnt us for it. We gave up free kicks in bad spots - and West Coast capitalised.
"With a young group, there is heaps to learn. And our team wants to learn - and they were hurting from the weekend. They have not shrugged their shoulders - they have taken the learnings.
"Western Bulldogs at Alberton in round two ... and we are excited to have our first-ever home game. It is a moment you would not want to miss. This is so meaningful for Port Adelaide."
FIRST ACHIEVER
PORT ADELAIDE has its first name in the AFLW's book of achievers - Abbey Dowrick.
Originally from Western Australia, 19-year-old Dowrick was a stand-out player - particularly to all the AFLW talent scouts who had ignored the midfielder as a draft prospect in 2020 and 2021- with her 21 disposals during her homecoming to Perth at the weekend.
The AFLW's judges have put Dowrick in the history books by coupling her AFLW debut with a NAB Rising Star nomination.
And her coach Lauren Arnell awaits Dowrick marking more and more pages in Port Adelaide's AFL "herstory".
"We have a large group of young players with huge potential. Abbey is one of those," Arnell said. "For Abbey to be recognised for performing at the level she did last week is important. What is more important for Abbey and the rest of her team-mates is to build consistency. Abbey has set a standard now - and I am looking forward to her building consistency throughout the season."
"Jules (Juliet Haslam, Port Adelaide's AFLW football chief) gave me a call around lunchtime (on Monday) and I got a bit scared at first. I thought I’d done something wrong. I’m over the moon, I’m speechless ... probably won’t sink in for a bit. It was pretty surreal. It’s left me a bit speechless this whole week."
Abbey Dowrick
WOOF, WOOF
WHO are the Western Bulldogs?
Part of AFLW Season 1, the Footscray Football Club has a long story in women's football - and has been home to some of the game's greatest advocates of female football: Susan Alberti, Australian Football Hall of Fame member Debbie Lee ...
Where Australian football was born from the original Geelong-Melbourne rivalry of the 1850s, the women's game gets its significant foundation for a national women's competition with the Western Bulldogs and Melbourne. The two clubs in June 2013 at the MCG played in the first AFL-sanctioned women's exhibition match - Melbourne won, 8.5 (53) to 3.3 (21). While the two clubs kept competing each season for the Hampson-Hardeman Cup, the AFL set about forming the first national women's competition.
The Western Bulldogs were, quite appropriately, handed one of the inaugural AFLW licences (one of four in Victoria) for the first AFLW series that involved eight teams from 2017.
There has been much bark - and one big bite - from the Western Bulldogs during the first six seasons of AFLW. Just one finals series - and it was completed with the premiership.
Port Adelaide senior coach Lauren Arnell has family history with the Western Bulldogs. Her great uncle, Ray Walker, was 1963 best-and-fairest champion at Footscray, now the Western Bulldogs. Her father was born the day of - "or the day after" the Bulldogs 1954 (VFL) premiership. Her life was based on devotion to the Bulldogs.
"I used to go to Whitten Oval (during the 1990s) and stand among the cigarette smoke and the tins of VB,” Arnell recalls. “And listen to all the old western suburbs crew abusing the opposition and umpires.
"I was 10. I was the kid who would read everything about the Bulldogs, watch the reserves – we’d be there all day. I knew every player. (Port Adelaide 2004 premiership player and current midfield coach) Brett Montgomery, I have not told him yet, was my favourite Bulldogs player. I’d read the AFL Record, try to memorise their birthdays – that was what I loved. I knew where they all came from."
Today, Arnell is all Port Adelaide.
"I have moved on ... quite easily," says Arnell. "I worked on radio for three years with (Western Bulldogs) coach Nathan Burke. I am just keen to beat them at the weekend - and keen to shake Nathan's hand at the end of the game with a smile on my face."
"We’re expecting a hard contest. They’ve been in the competition for a few years and from previous experience they play really hard. (Lauren Arnell) just wants us to concentrate on a good contest and bringing a hard game and pressure. We learned a lot from our practice matches that we were able to play so the more that we play footy, the more we will develop those areas."
Port Adelaide midfielder Maria Moloney
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
"We have always talked in our program around the 'Port Adelaide way'. And being hard working, being humble, being genuine, being authentic.
"We embrace the history, the rich history. Our group has embraced that really strongly. We are aware of our chance to create new history with an AFLW program. We are doing that really well - and (on Saturday) our group is looking forward to showing on field what they are about.
"I can guarantee we will play hard Port Adelaide football ... and we will make sure we continue to do that.
"Talk to anyone in our group, ask them how they want to be known as a team. That is our starting point. Every single team we play agains this year will know they had to any any win or any goal against Port Adelaide. That is a special part of our group. It is something we treasure.
"(We want to be) a really hard team to play against. I have no doubt that every single person who watched our game last week (against West Coast in Perth) saw that.
"We just have to do it for four quarters ..."
Port Adelaide senior coach Lauren Arnell
BIRD SEED
(little stuff that means most)
PORT ADELAIDE v WESTERN BULLDOGS
First Port Adelaide AFLW home match
When: Saturday, September 3, 2022
Time: 1.10pm (Adelaide)
Where: Alberton Oval
First meeting of the teams
Western Bulldogs entered AFLW as one of the eight foundation clubs in 2017. The club won the 2018 AFLW title, beating Brisbane in the grand final - the only season in which the Western Bulldogs have played finals. The team's season-by-season record is: Sixth, premiers, seventh, 12th, eighth and seventh in AFLW Season 6 that was completed earlier this year.
Last weekend: Port Adelaide lost to West Coast by 12 points at Lathlain Park in Perth; Western Bulldogs defeated Greater Western Sydney by seven points at Princes Park, Carlton.
