If Michelle Dench was in fact named Michael...

If Michelle Dench was in fact named Michael, much would be written in the coming weeks about her contribution to our game. The standard double page spread incorporating an interview with one of Melbourne’s most renowned journalists, giving readers and worshippers of the game a candid and intimate insight into the heart and soul of a champion, would be a must read. The cheer squad would busily prepare a banner acknowledging her champion status, complete with a two storey high caricature of Dench in typical fashion, of her in full flight, in an all too familiar pose that the thousands of supporters who had watched and adored her play had come to know as simply Dench-like. Footage from her early days in the AFL showing her gawky and awkward adolescence combined with obvious promise and talent would provide us with moments of nostalgia and be accompanied with a soundtrack to inspire us to laud her further.

Much would be made about her pedigree, as the off spring of North Melbourne full back of the century, David Dench. There would be questions not about whether she would go on to achieve AFL Hall of Fame status like her father, but rather simply ‘how long’ before the AFL would to allow her to join her father and others who had gone before in dazzling the football community with such grace, talent and flair. The Ablett-like photographs of a young Dench kicking the football around Arden Street would tell the beginning of the story that was now coming to a close. Her pathway through to the football’s elite ranks would have begun sometime around her birth, when recruiters and scouts tracked her progress and talent from her Auskick debut. North Melbourne would have been thrilled with the prospect of snaring such brilliance via a father-son pick in the national draft that every piece of advice would have been offered to her as she traversed the talented player pathway from junior football through to the TAC Cup. Her part in history as a likely member of the Pagan-Carey led Kangaroos that were so dominant and captured two premierships in the nineties would be well told. Perhaps she would have snared herself a Norm Smith medal along the way, so influential was her impact in grand finals.

Instead the real-life female version of Dench has spent the last eight years playing for Melbourne University, which ironically, is just down the road from her beloved North Melbourne Kangaroos. The veteran has carried her father’s number 23 on her back in over one hundred Victorian Women’s Football League games as she toiled furiously to follow his footsteps.

Words synonymous with the older Dench’s playing style, such as dash and polish, were used to describe his daughter from the moment she swapped her elite basketball hi-tops for football boots. Her ability to keep the ball at her finger tips as she evaded, ducked and weaved her way through packs to find the space to send the ball into the arms of a waiting forward or set of goal posts was game changing.

Her career in the Victorian Women’s Football League is decorated in a similar manner to the elder Dench, including the coveted VWFL Best First Year player award in her debut season, four club Best and Fairest awards, a Runner Up in the Helen Lambert medal (VWFL Brownlow), three All-Australian honours, four Victorian caps, and selection in the VWFL’s Silver Jubilee Team on her favoured wing. Whilst the 2006 Victorian Captain never got to take her place alongside Archer, Carey and Stevens in the premierships of ‘96 and ‘99, she did go one better in winning three with Melbourne University from a record eight consecutive grand final appearances. Appointed Melbourne University captain in 2006 following a premiership season, it looked as though she would emulate her father’s efforts in captaining a premiership, but it was not to be. The club fell at the final hurdle on three consecutive occasions under Dench’s reign, but it was not from a lack of trying. Renowned as a big game player, Dench was acknowledged as Melbourne University’s Player of the Finals on four occasions.

So whilst the football public has continued to enjoy the unique exploits of former champions thanks to their offspring, missing from the list of football family dynasties that includes the Fletchers, Silvagnis, Clokes and Shaws, are the Denches. Our failure to adequately acknowledge the female game means that careers such as Michelle Dench’s will never be enjoyed how it might have been should she have inherited a Y chromosome as well as some fine football genetics from her father. For those of us to have played alongside her, it has been impossible to separate being her team mate from being one of her fans. Her amazing work ethic has ensured that she has been one of the hardest working women to ever pull on the boots, allowing her to achieve heights that demand documentation. When the status of the women’s game is such that they are inducted into a Hall of Fame, Michelle Dench will continue to follow in her father’s footsteps in being one of the first women to take their rightful place in it. Until then, it is important that her story is told and celebrated just as it would have been should she have been named Michael.