Good Australian Football

This is a saying deserving of acceptance: "If you want to watch good Australian football, watch the W-League".

If you want to watch "elite" Australian football, watch the A-League. Sure, you have to pay for the priviledge as it can only be seen on Pay TV or at a live match, but you can see the high-paid high-flyers of what football talent can be bothered staying in Australia or thinks Oz will be a nice stepping stone on the way to somewhere better.

Alternatively, if you'd like to watch good Australian football, you could watch the W-League. You can see them for free of a Saturday afternoon by tuning into the ABC.

Well, you could. The grand-final is this weekend, and I recommend you tune in to watch it. These girls are good. I mean, really good. I've been watching the A-League just long enough to forget what good football looks like, but an afternoon with Canberra United reminded me. Sadly, they aren't in the grand final. They lost out to Brisbane Roar after a game that was so well played and hotly contended that it came down to a shootout in order to determine the winner.

Now, I have seen some good football matches in the A-League. Mostly involving teams other than the Fury, but that's beside the point. The women in the W-League just seem to play a better class of football entirely. It's even better than some of the Bundesliga matches I've seen.

What really annoys me is how long it took me to discover the W-League. I don't usually read the TV listings for a Saturday afternoon, and no one advertised or mentioned the fact that the game was on.

And, I mean no one. Even in this day and age, women's leagues don't get listed in the "What sport is playing on TV this week" lists, they are rarely (if ever) covered in the sports pages of the news papers - and even the ABC can't be bothered advertising them during the week.

This is pathetic, people. It's the 21st Century, and we are in the most sports obsessed country on the face of the earth. Surely we could start giving women's leagues better coverage?