The first AFL-sanctioned women's match has been declared a resounding success with the movement now set to receive unprecedented league support after winning a host of powerful new fans.
A contest between Australia's most talented female footballers who played for Melbourne and the Western Bulldogs in a historic curtain-raiser to the corresponding men's fixture last Saturday at the MCG, will almost certainly be repeated in 2014 and may even happen twice next season. The grand plan is that a televised national women's competition will be functioning by 2020, and that some AFL clubs could adopt women's teams permanently.
A crowd of about 3000 assembled for the start of the women's match and swelled to about 7500 by three-quarter-time - about 90 minutes before the start of the traditional main event that eventually drew 21,217 spectators.
The three-quarter-time attendance for the female footy game - bigger than the crowds recorded for four Greater Western Sydney games this season - impressed AFL deputy chief executive Gillon McLachlan.
''I thought it was fantastic. I think that the talent in women's football is a story that we haven't told very well … it's not something that we've pushed or told stories about,'' McLachlan told Fairfax Media. ''I think this year is the first time we have, and I think it was certainly something that people wanted to know more about, and bought into.
''The fact that there were around 3000 people there for the start of the game, and around 7000 people there at three-quarter-time, it's obvious that it has interest for a lot of people. I think that can be regarded as a great success.
''I think what is 100 per cent on the agenda now is that Australian rules football is a legitimate sporting option for all women … we certainly think there is great scope to improve and evolve the stream of football for talented girls.''
AFL Commission chairman Mike Fitzpatrick was among the crowd from the opening bounce of the women's game on Saturday, and in his enthusiastic post-match address to the players he not only declared the event a success but confessed he was pleasantly surprised by the skills he'd witnessed.
McLachlan said he felt reluctant to forecast the next step for the AFL and women's footy, but was adamant there was a place for it in an AFL setting beyond the league's annual-themed women's round.
''People want to watch other people play sport - men or women,'' he said.
''I don't want to be prescriptive about what it looks like, but I think the issue of talented women playing football is firmly on the agenda and it's something I think will grow and evolve significantly.
''When I talk about it growing and evolving part of that is obviously that it becomes more visible.
''I just think that it is something that hasn't been pushed as hard as we might, in the story of women's round and women in football generally. But I think talent is something that we really should be talking about and celebrating going forward in the context of women in our game. What that looks like we need to work out. Where we go from here is one of the key things to be driven out of the weekend.''
The AFL's female football development manager, Jan Cooper, was a driving force behind the weekend's women's match and said that, as the pioneers of the pilot, Melbourne and the Bulldogs could rightly lay claim to helping lead the next steps. Cooper said if the two clubs were fixtured to play each other twice next season it was conceivable that there could be two AFL-sanctioned women's matches between Melbourne and the Dogs in 2014. ''I'm confident saying that game will happen again, and there will be a lot more around it in terms of presenting the female role models out in the various community development programs that both clubs run.
''What this has done is caused mainstream media, and a lot more people, to pay a lot more attention to something that hasn't really been given much kudos in the past,'' Cooper said.
In the lead-up to the game, Bulldogs president Peter Gordon admitted the potential in women's football - and the benefits for AFL clubs that supported it - hadn't truly been on his radar.
Gordon said events of last week had converted him virtually overnight and he was among a group eager for the women's match to be telecast, though lobbying of the broadcaster of the men's match, Fox Sports, was unsuccessful.
