With lines like "a lady must never complain and boast" juxtaposed with bone-crunching tackles and bravado, the video highlights just how far expectations of what it means to be a woman have come — through the prism of some seriously good football.

It's an uplifting — even feminist — note for the competition to start on in its fifth year, in part fuelled by what Nicole Livingstone has described as the AFL's "absolute commitment" to ensure there is no repeat of the previous season, in which no premier was awarded.

In 2020, AFLW was called off with just the preliminary and grand finals remaining after the Federal Government banned all "non-essential" domestic travel in March.

In hindsight, the decision was a poor look for gender equality, considering the elaborate strategies that would later be employed to ensure the men's competition could be completed.

It's also a situation that has been mirrored globally — including in cricket — with women's competitions cancelled or postponed as the first casualty of COVID-19.

In fairness to the AFL, while Australians may now be used to the idea of hubs, bubbles and quarantined tennis players, sport hardly seemed to qualify as essential travel back in March 2020.

But there are no such excuses this year.

Pandemic accelerates competition's maturity

With some irony, COVID-19 has also paved the way for a raft of changes that fans and players have long been asking for, and which signal the competition's growing maturity.

These include ticketing games — in part to ensure patron safety — and charging adults $10 for entry, while children are still able to attend for free.

In response to a query about the revenue generated, the AFL would not confirm that this money will be reinvested into women's football. At the least, however, it is a welcome and symbolic shift that designates the value of a product that drew a record-breaking crowd of 53,034 to its last grand final.

This does not mean crowds are likely to be as strong in 2021, or that attendance will be easy.

Aside from the video on social media, advertising and promotion for the competition has been scarce. So too has clarity on how to purchase tickets; due to the ongoing nature of COVID-19 restrictions, these will only be sold on the Monday of each week's round, and will need to be pre-purchased, with no ticket sales at grounds.

While the logic of this decision is purportedly to stop patrons crowding in ticket lines, it presents a barrier to the "community-friendly" feel of the women's game which attracts less-traditional football fans, often to suburban grounds.

More promisingly, while AFW has at times been a stage for the AFL's experimentation, 2021 finally marks an end to the controversial "conference system" that confused old and new fans of the game alike.

Replacing the clunky, dual-ladder system, the 14 clubs will now vie for the premiership in a more traditional format.

What has not changed is that the competition runs for just nine rounds, meaning all clubs will not play each other once, and making fairness of the fixture impossible.

It also means players train year-round for a home and away competition that lasts just over two months — a situation drawn into sharp focus by Ebony Marinoff's controversial three-week suspension (currently under appeal) that, if upheld, will see her miss a third of the season.

Flexibility not always possible for AFLW

On Friday last week, the AFL announced that the season's fixture had also been significantly rejigged in response to the hard West Australian border — a situation both predictable and one that mirrors the rolling changes to the AFL men's competition in 2020.

But while there are parallels with the way the men's competition was adapted, the solutions for running AFLW in a pandemic are not simple, and can't by nature be the same.

The obvious difference is that the players are not professional athletes, with their comparatively miniscule salaries meaning many work part-time to maintain a living.

"Hubbing" away from home makes it near impossible to maintain this already delicate and precarious dance, especially for those who work on the so-called front line, such as nurses and police.

As only one example, GWS player and firefighter Lou Stephenson was in January forced to stay in NSW to complete training, while her teammates relocated to Albury and then Adelaide, and looks likely to miss round one as a result.