You know, the more and more I watch the AFL Women’s competition, the more I

1. Appreciate the game of Australian Rules Football
2. Respect the shit out of these women that play this game and expose themselves to injury while maintaining regular jobs
3. Dig the AFL and how it’s run.

It’s really awesome how they have managed to put out a quality product on the very first year of existence and are continuously learning from their experiences.  More on that on a future AFL Beat.

This week,

we have Round 4 of the AFL Women’s, Week 2 of AFL preseason, an invitation to a betting thing, and an invitation to another betting thing.

Welcome to Balls of Steel’s AFL Beat!

We will begin, as always, with actual footy that means something which, of course, means AFL Women’s.  We are slightly more than halfway through the short 7 round season and the first game this weekend was essentially an elimination game:  Melbourne v Carlton.  Unfortunately, by the time I got home from work, the game was over.  HOWEVAH, the beauty of the Watch AFL app this year is that I was able to watch the game from the beginning without knowing the score.

After a soccer-like 1-1 first quarter, the two teams started to hit the scoreboard and Melbourne jumped out to a 17 point lead.  The Blues then launched a furious comeback and managed to tie the game at 36 with six minutes left.  Unfortunately for the Blues, someone left Richelle Cranston all alone in front of goal and the Demons found her with two minutes left to make the final difference.  The Blues are now 0-2 in their last two games.  Coincidentally, they have worn their baby blue U*NC-like guernseys for those two losses so the Curse of Hippo may be upon them.

Here are some highlights:

One thing that struck me about the broadcast is that the announcer made a point to say that Melbourne’s Shelley Scott was a dairy farmer from a small town.  You know who that reminds me of, right?

The next game was the battle for my…heart as the Brisbane Lions took on the GWS Giants.  This one I was able to see live and, let me tell you, these Brisbane Lions are for real.  They absolutely destroyed the Giants by a score of 43-9.   Have I mentioned that these women are fucking fearless?

And that they hit harder than the New York Jets?

I would be remiss if I didn’t show Kaitlyn Ashmore’s amazing goal from a ridiculous angle.  This one deserves the video treatment:

Here is the full highlights video if you want to see more carnage:

The third game didn’t start until after midnight Pacific time, so I missed it live. It was Western against winless Collingwood, so I figured I was safe in checking the score in the morning.  Imagine my surprise when I saw that the Pies got their first AFL Women’s win!

This game was probably the best that the Pies have played this year and they deserved that victory.  Here is a nice goal from Alicia Eva:

The full highlight video is here:

The last game, Adelaide v Fremantle, was late on Saturday night so I didn’t watch it live either.  Upon waking up this morning, I see that, as expected,  the Adelaide Crows won.  The Dockers jumped out to a 13 point lead in the first,  but the Crows came back and ended up winning by 23. The Fremantle Dockers are now out of Grand Final contention.

Let’s take a look at the ladder shall we?

It’s nice that at least everyone has earned points.  Also the Brisbane Lions women’s team has now outpointed the men’s team from last season.  In just four games.  You can see next week’s games on the schedule below:

The key game will be the battle of the top two teams, Adelaide and Brisbane, in the last game of the Round.  Depending on the result of the GWS-Melbourne game, this will either bring the Demons into the battle to get into the Grand Final, or solidify that Grand Final matchup as a replay of this match.  Next week is a must-watch for sure.

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AFL Footy Tipping Contest

As you may remember, Litre_cola was nice enough to set up a contest last year in which we make picks as to who will win each AFL game straight up. As a tiebreaking procedure, you must also choose the winning margin for one game each week. It runs the entire season and culminates in the Grand Final.  Last year, I BARELY hung on to win after a disastrous finals performance.  I think I may have picked just one finals game correctly.  Seriously, it was almost an Atlanta Falcons-esque choke job.

I highly encourage everyone to join.  Since we have a few new fans, this is another great way for you to get into the game and learn more about it and the league as a whole.  It’s on the ESPN Australia site and is, of course, free.  The link to the group is here:

http://hosted.mobile.footytips.com.au/competitions/?ff=settings&competitionId=401652

We’re currently at 9 members.  I pledge to you that if we can get to 15 members, I will offer a prize along the lines of what we have previously done at DFO for the NFL picks competitions.  The more the merrier, so join the fun!

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AFL Preseason

As you saw in the schedule above, we also had some AFL Preseason games intertwined with the AFL Women’s schedule.  There are four weeks of games with each team playing three games, so there are some teams that are playing this week for the first time this year.  Such was the case on North American Wednesday night/Thursday morning as the St. Kilda Saints and the Port Adelaide Power both made their season debuts.

The Saints led from the beginning and had the lead up to over 30 points in the second quarter.  In the second half, however, the Power came back and got the game back within 1.  Unfortunately, they ran out of time and St. Kilda held on for the one point win. Here is a nice bit of play and a juggling mark for the Saints that resulted in a goal to start the game off:

On Thursday night/Friday morning, the Richmond Tigers and Adelaide Crows also played their first game. The result was a bit of a surprise as the Tigers took it 92-73.   Here is the obligatory Eddie Betts brilliance:

On North American Friday night, the Melbourne Demons played the Carlton Blues as part of a doubleheader with the AFL Women’s teams. The result was the same although the margin was wider for the men’s game as the Demons beat the Blues 116-62. This gives you a sense of how easy it was for the Demons:

In the late late game on Friday night, the West Coast Eagles won the Perth Derby against Fremantle by a convincing 107-52 score. Here is probably the only highlight for the Dockers:

North American Saturday night brought two games watchable at a decent hour:  Hawthorn v North Melbourne and Gold Coast v Essendon. I watched the Hawthorn-Kangaroos clash live and I’m not sure what to make of the Roos’ victory.

On the one hand,  it was nice and they played well.  On the other,  Hawthorn were clearly taking this as a practice/pre-season game and made a ton of changes to get people rested and see new faces.  I know one thing,  this was a nice mark:

I was tired by the time the second game got going,  so I only saw a little bit before crashing.  When I woke up this morning,  I saw that the Suns just barely edged out the Bombers by 3. Here is a great hustle goal:

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DFO Poker Club

We at DFO are constantly looking for ways to improve the commentist experience.  The thing that built this site was the sense of comraderie that existed on the open threads at our former home.  We wanted to keep that sense of community going.

Realistically, we all live in different cities and countries, so it’s very difficult for us to get together in real life.  The Las Vegas DFO Convention last December was a smashing success (shut up tWBS, I know I didn’t go, but I had a valid reason!), but that may only happen once a year if we are lucky.

The Southern California DFO contingent has been pretty good about getting together for beers.  The last time we toasted to our good friend WhyEaglesWhy who flew in from Australia on his getting-engaged-World Tour and showed us the gigantic rock he bought for his bride-to-be.  If you are in the LA area next weekend, we will be having the second annual DFO Pub Crawl in lovely Atwater Village on Saturday, March 4.  RTD will be putting together a post later this week with details but from what I heard we start out at The Morrison at 2 PM and head east from there.

Ok, so what am I getting at?  When we got together last, SonofSpam suggested a poker game and we all thought it was a good idea.  Since the rest of you couldn’t possibly all fit at his house, I did some research to see if we could do something online.  Turns out you can!

PokerStars has a feature that allows players to set up Poker Clubs and play with friends.  So, I set one up and tested it this weekend with the help of a few DFOers.  So far so good, so we are ready to announce it to the world!  Joining is very easy.  Here is what you do:

If you don’t already have it, download the free software from www.pokerstars.com (the download was virus-free)

Create an account (if you live in the US, it will warn you that you can only play for fake money)

Please make sure that your Username is as close to your DFO name as possible

Open the main poker lobby, then click on the Three Dots (…) with the word
More” on the far right and then the Home Games tab

Click the ‘Join a Poker Club’ button

Enter the Club ID number: 2103481

Enter the Invitation Code: National Disgrace

That’s it! Once I’ve approved your membership request, we’ll be ready to start playing Home Games online together.  I’ve created several tables (for the lowest minimums the site offers) so that people can just casually get together at any time and start playing.  At the moment, we are looking to play on Friday and Saturday nights, but anyone can go in at any time and start playing whenever you feel like it.  Just leave a comment on whatever post is up at the time and see if anyone wants to play.

The goal is at some point to have a DFO-wide Commentist Poker Tournament with a grand prize to the winner.  The key will be to coordinate a date that works for the majority of DFOers.

PokerStars gives you 30,000 in play chips to start.  Since the minimum buy-in (set by PokerStars, not me and I can’t change it) is 20,000, that doesn’t give us a lot of wiggle room.  There is always, however, a solution.  PokerStars allows you to get 12,500 free chips every four hours.  All you have to do is log on, grab your free chips, and log off.  You can build up a nice bankroll that way.

There is a PokerStars app that allows you to play on the site with your mobile phone.  However, I have tested it and I discovered that Home Games are not supported.  The free chip offer IS supported, so you can log on while at work on your phone, grab your free chips, and then have a nice bankroll for that evening.

PokerStars “generously” gives you the opportunity to buy play chips with real money (and I suppose that is a big way that they are able to make money in the US), so you always have that option, but the point here is to have fun and I don’t want anyone to have to spend actual money to have fun online.  That’s just against everything the Internet stands for!

We currently have 14 members in the DFO Poker Club.  The maximum allowed by PokerStars is 50.  I highly encourage everyone that likes to have fun, make dick jokes while playing poker on one screen and enjoying Moose gifs on another, and hang out with imaginary friends to join in.  Please let me know in the comments if you have any questions.

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That’s all for this week.  I leave you with this week’s Pacific Heat dialogue:

Chief: Every intelligence agency has been trying to track this madman down but, so far, no one has been able to get close to him. He always seems to be one step ahead of us.

Maddie: Any chance there could be a leak?

Chief: Well, it’s possible. I’ve been liasing with my counterparts at Interpol, the Pentagon, MI-5, the Yakuza, but no one…

Veronica:  The Yakuza?

Chief: Huh?

Maddie:  Japanese underworld organization.

Chief: Is it?

Todd: Might may have found that leak.

Chief:  Anyway, we think we might FINALLY have come up with a way of nailing Al-Qasim. Meet Abdul Al-Shari.  According to our intel, Al-Shari and Al-Qasim have one thing in common.

Todd:  They don’t believe in shaving?

Chief: No.

Zac:  They’re both called Al?

See you next week!