Essendon’s Midseason Axe Is a Sign AFLW Still Isn’t Safe
One win, one round left, and Essendon decided they couldn’t even wait for the siren on the season before swinging the axe. Natalie Wood is out as Bombers AFLW coach, and honestly, the timing alone tells you everything about where this decision actually came from.
Let’s be real for a second. Sacking a coach with a round still to play isn’t a footy decision, it’s a vibes decision. It’s a club looking at a one-win list, panicking, and wanting to be seen doing something rather than actually doing the right thing by the players or the coach. No notes needed on how that looks from the outside.
The Numbers Don’t Lie, But They Don’t Tell the Whole Story Either
One win from however many games is rough, nobody’s pretending otherwise. Essendon’s AFLW program has been stuck in neutral while clubs like North Melbourne, the Hawks and yeah, my beloved Lions, have shown what happens when you actually invest in list management, development pathways and giving a program time to breathe.
But here’s the thing that gets lost every single time a club has a shocker of a season: a win-loss record in AFLW almost never tells you the full story. Is the list ageing out? Are the best young Victorian and interstate talents choosing other clubs because the pathway looks greener elsewhere? Is the club actually backing the program with resources, or is it still very much the little sibling to the men’s side getting leftover training slots and support staff?
You can’t just plug those questions into a stat sheet. Wood inherited a program, she didn’t build Essendon’s entire AFLW infrastructure from scratch in a vacuum, and footy fans acting like one win equals one bad coach are missing the forest for the trees.
Why Sack Mid-Season Anyway
This is the bit that actually annoys me the most. If Essendon genuinely believed a coaching change was needed, fine, that’s a legitimate call for any club to make. But doing it with a game still on the fixture is just a weird look all round.
It leaves the playing group coachless, or scrambling with an interim appointment, for the most meaningless dead-rubber game of the year. It sends a message to the players that even showing up and competing week to week doesn’t buy you stability from the people meant to be leading the program. And it lets the club quietly dodge the awkward conversation of fronting the full exit review at season’s end, because hey, it’s already done and dusted by the time everyone’s doing their report cards.
If you’re going to make the call, own it properly at the right time. Doing it mid-season just screams knee-jerk.
Spare a Thought for the Players Here
Nobody ever talks about what this does to the actual playing list. These are young women, a lot of them part-time footballers juggling study or work around training, who’ve just had their coach pulled out from under them with one game to go. That’s not nothing.
Whoever Essendon slots in for that last round, whether it’s an assistant stepping up or some interim arrangement, is walking into a group that’s just watched their head coach get the boot before they’d even finished the fixture. That’s a tough spot for a playing group to be put in, and it’s the players who have to front up and actually play the footy while the club sorts its politics out behind the scenes.
The Bigger Picture for AFLW
This is where I’ll pivot to the stuff that actually matters long-term, because AFLW coaching turnover is becoming a legit talking point across the comp and not just an Essendon issue. We’ve seen multiple clubs chop and change coaches in recent seasons, and it raises a fair question about whether some programs are being judged on men’s-competition timelines and expectations when the resourcing, list sizes and development runway simply aren’t the same.
Up here in Queensland we’ve seen what patience and proper investment actually builds. The Lions didn’t become a genuine flag contender overnight, it took years of list continuity, coaching stability and the club actually treating the program like it mattered, not like a box-ticking exercise bolted onto the men’s operation. Expansion clubs and rebuilding programs need the exact same runway if the comp wants genuine parity across all eighteen clubs rather than three or four powerhouses and everyone else treading water.
If Essendon want to fix this properly, the coaching change is honestly the easy part. The harder, less headline-grabbing questions are about recruiting and retention, about whether the club’s list management strategy has actually kept pace with the comp’s evolution, and about whether AFLW gets genuine equal billing inside the building or whether it’s still an afterthought behind the men’s program.
What Happens Next
Essendon will obviously go through the usual process now, caretaker coach for the last round, a review over the off-season, a list of candidates floated by every man and his dog on footy Twitter within about a week. That’s all standard stuff.
But the real test for this club isn’t who they appoint next, it’s whether they actually address the structural stuff that got them to one win in the first place. A new coach walking into the same resourcing gaps, the same list issues and the same pathway problems is just going to be back here in twelve months having this exact same conversation, and Wood will have copped the blame for problems that go well beyond anything one coach could fix in the time she was given.
AFLW deserves better than knee-jerk sackings mid-season treated as a quick fix. The comp’s growing fast, the standard’s rising every single year, and clubs that don’t properly invest in their programs are going to keep cycling through coaches while the gap to the competitive pack just gets wider. Essendon fans deserve answers on the bigger picture, not just a press release about a coaching change with a round still to go.
