It doesn't matter if it's a women's or men's team, if you have a coach who has been around for 5 years with a flawed gameplan that isn't based on a defence first mindset and doesn't stand up in finals, and you get too many recruiting decisions wrong, and you don't have your own state league side to develop your players properly, then you won't succeed.
Personally think our gameplan in both the men's and women's has been massively flawed in recent years. We don't set up defensively as a team at contests and stoppages while this overuse of handball crap completely crumbles under any pressure. Our so called efforts in last 6 weeks of the AFLW especially were just embarrassing from a tactical point of view. So many losses this season were on Ferguson being outcoached. We looked devoid of any sense of a cohesive gameplan and team structure compared to other sides.
As for Norf, they entered the AFLW comp the same year we did from memory. They got their list build, coaching and development right. We didn't.
Sadly, got a feeling we've wasted Katie Brennan's best years. It looked like age was catching up with her this season
.