PRESEASON is underway at AFL Women’s clubs ahead of the 2022 season, which was unfortunately delayed an extra month from December to the start of January. Despite this, there is still plenty to get excited about and as part of the build-up Draft Central has teamed up with some of the most passionate and knowledgable AFL Women’s independent media organisations to bring you a Top 50 AFL Women’s Players countdown.
Representatives from Siren Sport, Outer Sanctum and Women’s Australian Rules Football (WARF) Radio have submitted who they think the Top 50 Players for the AFL Women’s competition will be in 2022. That data has been collated to form a consensus countdown from 50 to one, running from Monday, October 11 through right up until December 17 with a player per day. By then, the AFL Women’s season will be just a few weeks away post-Christmas and New Years, and the action can begin.
Each of the experts – who include Gemma Bastiani (Siren Sport), Peter Holden (WARF Radio) and Lucy Race (collating with The Outer Sanctum team) – were asked to list their top players for the 2022 season in an opinion-based countdown, in addition to Draft Central team members Peter Williams, Michael Alvaro, Sophie Taylor, Declan Reeve and Alyce Collett. There were no caveats on this, meaning any player could be selected, and whilst many names frequently appeared across Top 50s, there was a large range of unique selections as well.
The collation of data for the Top 50 will be based on the median number across the eight countdowns, with a tiebreaker of the average for those with the same median score. From a data perspective, 47 of the Top 50 players landed on four predictive lists, but only 22 players were in everyone’s Top 50, showing the evenness for the Draft crop.
Draft Central’s 2022 AFL Women’s Top 50 Countdown:
October 11-15: 50th – 46th
October 18-22: 45th – 41st
October 25-29: 40th – 36th
November 1-5: 35th – 31st
November 8-12: 30th – 26th
November 15-19: 25th – 21st
November 22-26: 20th – 16th
Nov/Dec 29-3: 15th – 11th
December 6-10: 10th – 6th
December 13-17: 5th – 1st
The countdowns will also feature some comments from the various experts at the pointy end of the count, as we work our way down the list. Draft Central thanks those who took the time to submit lists as part of the countdown.
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