Melbourne Victory has defeated Melbourne City on penalties in an A-League Women's match that had everything you could want from an elimination semi-final — except a crowd worthy of the spectacle.
After a nail-biting end to their regular seasons, City and Victory found themselves in another local derby, the 18th time in their history.
Coming into Saturday's match, the results had been split: eight wins each, with one draw. Along the way, City had netted 27 goals, Victory 25.
This year, Victory had their noses in front, after a 1-1 draw in January and a 2-0 win in March. In last year's finals series, fourth-placed Victory swept past runners-up City 3-1.
There were little rivalries all over the field, with a handful of Victory players like Melina Ayres, Beattie Goad, Amy Jackson, and the injured side-line commentator Elise Kellond-Knight having represented (and won titles with) their cross-town rivals in the past.
The game itself delivered on the traditional derby drama and chaos, with the finals circumstances pushing tension to a new level.
The first 15 minutes were tense, scrappy, and raw, interrupted by a handful of daring saves at both ends as Melissa Barbieri and Casey Dumont, two of the ALW's most experienced and decorated goalkeepers, threw themselves around in the rain.
With five minutes left in the opening half, City were in the lead thanks to a slicing series of passes between winger Holly McNamara and midfielder Rhianna Pollicina.
But, six minutes into the second, City let their lead slide away as defender Naomi Thomas-Chinnama crashed into the legs of Victory winger Beattie Goad in the penalty area.
Striker Melina Ayres buried the spot-kick before scoring twice more in the 67th and 72nd minutes, becoming just the second player in history to score a hat-trick in the ALW finals series after Sam Kerr.
As the clock ticked into the final 10 minutes, it felt as though there was no coming back for City. Despite their dominance in possession, Victory barricaded themselves in deep defensive lines, forcing their opponents to take Hail Mary shots in faint hope the navy blue wall would part.
In the 79th minute, it did. A deep cross, a headed knock-down, and a charging, unmarked Pollicina brought City's second, before a fortuitous handball in the box by Victory defender Claudia Bunge with just three minutes to go saw City just a kick away from drawing level.
And they may have, were it not for Dumont flinging herself down and to the left, her muddied knees deflecting McNamara's penalty, causing her excited team-mates to crash upon her. 'Surely,' you thought to yourself, 'Victory have won this.'
No, of course not. This is the ALW, after all. This is the Chaos League.
With 30 seconds of added time remaining, the pendulum of destiny swung back in City's favour as striker Hannah Wilkinson launched herself up into the grey afternoon and nodded a spinning clearance over the outstretched Dumont and into the net, levelling the scores at 3-3.
Extra-time came and went, with Victory clinging on for life as wave after wave of pale blue threatened to overwhelm before the referee's whistle signalled the game would be decided on penalties.
It wasn't a navy-blue shirt that stepped up to take Victory's first: it was the highlighter-yellow of Dumont herself, harking back to her Queensland Roar days when, as a 16-year-old, she stepped up to take the team's first penalty in their 2008/09 ALW semi-final win against Sydney FC.
She reprised that role here, coldly rolling the ball past the veteran Barbieri, before following its slick trail across the grass to take up her usual position between the posts.
Dumont went on to save two of City's next three penalties, almost single-handedly winning the match and keeping Victory's hopes at a Championship three-peat alive.
It was, undoubtedly, one of the greatest ALW semi-finals in history; the kind of game that is remembered as an all-time classic.
What a pity there was hardly anybody there to see it.
According to the league's official website, just 742 people made their way out to Casey Fields — about an hour south-east of Melbourne's CBD — for Saturday's 3pm kick-off.
With AAMI Park in Melbourne unavailable due to renovations for the 2023 Women's World Cup, City (as the higher-ranked side) decided to forgo stadiums closer to the city to instead stage the game at their in-construction training base in the geographical area they've been trying to capture for the past few years.
While the dreary weather didn't help, the broader inaccessibility of the ground to more casual fans on a weekend where there was no other major code being played in Melbourne resulted in uninspiring images of a half-empty suburban grandstand and dark smudges of groups of two or three fans scattered around the field's perimeter.
The game's lack of occasion was reflected by the pitch itself: a painted-over Aussie Rules field currently in use by Melbourne's state league teams, whose 50-metre boundary lines were still visible in the grass while fans were kept at a distance from the action due to the oval's wider permanent fencing.
It was even more difficult to watch if you weren't there. None of this season's ALW games — including, it appears, this weekend's semi-finals — have been broadcast on free-to-air television, with the Australian Professional Leagues (APL) re-jigging their deal with broadcasters Paramount+ and Network 10 to move all women's games online only.
The A-League Men currently has two games broadcast on Channel 10 each round.
And while there is some logic to the new arrangement, with wider trends showing that traditional television consumption going down as live-streaming grows, this competition is still at a stage where it needs the broadest possible appeal in order to attract casual or incidental fans, as well as those without access to the now-necessary digital platforms.
Instead, the current set-up requires fans to know where to look, signing up for a Paramount+ subscription or logging into Ten's live-streaming service, 10Play, before navigating various drop-down menus to locate the game.
With a Women's World Cup less than 100 days away, Australia's top-flight women's domestic league still feels buried beneath age-old apathies and counter-productive decision-making.
Despite one of the tightest and most dramatic campaigns in recent memory, the 2022/23 ALW season has seen the same problems recur like a bad dream: invisible games, inaccessible grounds, early summer kick-offs, a lack of mainstream promotion.
The players who contested Saturday's dramatic semi-final delivered all the hope and heartbreak any sports fan could want. But what was the point if nobody saw it?
