IN a weekly series at Rookie Me Central, we cast our eyes and ears around the league to gather thoughts from AFL Women’s coaches, and see what they had to say post their respective matches on the weekend.

This week it is back down to Melbourne to hear from the two coaches involved in the inaugural AFLW Dreamtime Match, Richmond’s Ryan Ferguson and Essendon’s Natalie Wood.

The victorious Ferguson was happy with certainly happy with the result, and stoked that his team finally got some reward for effort.  

“It was a heartstopper. I thought we controlled the last quarter really well, but there’s still some moments we can learn from, and we like learning from wins although losses teach us a lot. We like learning from wins, but after the couple early in the season that we felt like could have gotten a result it was just great reward for effort.”

Despite the win, there were a few key areas that Ferguson still wants his team to work on.

“I want them to take away how hard they had to fight for it. Like the Bombers, we knew they were potent in attack, we knew they were strong through the midfield, an exciting team, but they were hard and tough and worked really hard across the whole day. We had to fight hard for every inch and every single player had to play their part to get a really narrow victory. Just understand what it takes to win games of footy.”

He was full of praise for his defenders in particular, especially since they were down a few key stars.

“They did fantastically well. From a couple of years ago when we had Harriet Cordner and Rebecca Miller holding us up strong, and then without either of them to keep a good team to three goals, thought they just fought really well together. There’s still lots to learn from it, I think we can keep getting better, but they’re playing as a tough to score against unit, which is impressive having Bec out of that team.”

Meanwhile the frustration of falling so close again was clear on Wood’s face post match.

“Mixed emotions right off the bat without having had a lot of time to digest it” she said. “We come here to win games of football, so losing you’re obviously disappointed with the result but I’ve had a conversation with the girls in the rooms. We’ve lost two games close, one to Carlton who have been in the competition for six years, and then Richmond have been in the competition for three years, so I think there’s some things we’re doing really well as a group.”

Wood was clear in what went wrong for her side against the Tigers.

“There’s still plenty for us to learn and grow, and I think some of the connection probably broke down for us a bit today, but the thing that’s most impressive is our fight, our willingness to stay engaged in the contest and fight games down to the end. So yeah quite disappointed we didn’t get the result, but we’ll keep drawing the learnings out of it, the positives and the things we need to keep refining.”

When asked about her side’s tendency to put the foot on the gas in the last quarter and really accelarate on the scoring front, Wood said they flipped the script.

“Our first half was pretty impressive last week. For a group that’s just come together sometimes finding the way to stay mentally in games when you’re still building that connection can be a challenge, so to still be fighting games in the fourth quarter and I thought last week West Coast really took it to us in the second and third quarter so we really needed to focus in on some things in the fourth.

“We’ll continue to keep reviewing what we’re doing but you’ve also got to acknowledge that Richmond are a really fine team, and they’re three years in the competition and this year you can see they’re starting to reap the rewards of continuity of player, having continuity of their coach and they’re doing some fantastic things. To see us come up against some really good systems was good for us and we really would have learnt a lot.”