Sacked Western Bulldogs AFLW coach Nathan Burke has called on the AFL to conduct a training audit of clubs amid vast discrepancies between the league’s superpowers and battlers with a series of season nine blowouts.
The ninth AFLW home-and-away season has ended with a two-tiered competition in which three clubs won only a single game while Hawthorn, North Melbourne and Brisbane dropped only one or two games.
Despite the standard of the competition continuing to lift each year a series of one-sided contests took some of the gloss off the drama.
Burke told the Herald Sun’s Sacked podcast he still sees a future for the AFLW where players are on excellent wages but not officially full-time given many want to continue in part-time jobs or study.
But he says some playing groups are determined to stick to the AFL-mandated training limit, while others start a full pre-season in February and are prepared to go over and above with more sessions to get into elite shape.
Burke called out his playing group for a lack of fitness in his final season in 2023 and had to apologise to the group in a development that hurt his prospects of retaining his job.
The limit on contact hours at clubs this season was 22 per week and will lift to 25 next season.
“There is a group that wants it to be full time football and there is another group who likes playing footy but also loves working at the local cafe and loves going to uni and says, ‘There is a ceiling I am actually going to put on this’, Burke told Sacked.
“So you have a dichotomy of players within your group. Some say why can’t we train every day. Others are saying, ‘Hang on, I can only be here 20 파워볼 hours a week’. Don’t ask me to be here for 21 hours because I am going to complain’. So you are juggling that and if you have got a really militant AFLPA person (delegate) you have to stick to that.
“And then you look down the road at clubs who don’t have that person and if you are allowed to train 20 hours a week, they are doing 25.
“I hope to goodness someone within the AFL at the end of this season does an audit on what teams are doing.”