The bulk of Argentina’s players, as well as those of Fiji, Tonga and Samoa, are based in Europe. Whatever else might change in the brave new world, the timing of the competition will remain roughly the same - running from July to September.

That prevents both Argentina and either a combined Pacific Islands team or one of the three individual nations, depending on how things are structured, from gaining access to their best players. A competition featuring full-strength New Zealand, Australian and South Africa teams and a half-strength Argentina and Pacific Islands would be a disaster.

Indeed. That’s why it’s time for SANZAR and Europe to come together for the good of the sport. It’s time to combine Tri Nations with Six Nations, add Argentina and create Ten Nations Rugby.

Think about how big an event this would be in world sport — ten giants among national rugby union teams, criss-crossing the planet for nine weeks to play each other in a competition to determine true supremacy in the sport. Tell me that wouldn’t attract a huge international audience. Granted, it might be a scheduling nightmare, and those long plane trips would certainly test the limits of those athletes’ endurance, but it might be worth it to keep interest in rugby union alive in the nations where it’s most popular.

What do you think, rugby fans? Would you like to see Ten Nations Rugby? Or is there something else SANZAR could do to keep Tri Nations interesting?

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Because this match is really nothing but a massive compromise. The AFL clearly wants nothing to do with State of Origin anymore, because it sees itself as a continent-wide competition now, which makes State of Origin redundant. The players, however, clearly want the series to make a comeback. Some are even shrugging off minor injury concerns to play in this Hall of Fame match. When was the last time you heard of an NFL player shrugging off an injury to play in the Pro Bowl?

Clearly, State of Origin still means something to these guys, and it certainly has a rich tradition in Australian sport. The NRL still holds its State of Origin series. So why has the AFL abandoned it?

Simply put, fans stopped caring in the 1990s. The VFL became the AFL and went national, and attendance for State of Origin games declined to the point where it wasn’t worth holding the series anymore. Will this match change that? Or is this just a one-off compromise that the AFL will use to satisfy the players and historians, then shove back in the closet?

The AFL Hall of Fame Tribute Match will air in America on Setanta Sports at 3:00 PM on Saturday afternoon. If you’re curious about Aussie Rules, this would be a good game to watch. Judging from the rosters, there’s going to be a shitload of talent on that oval.

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He’s big! He’s red!
He’s 15 million quid!
Peter Crouch! Peter Crouch!

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Here’s the $78 million question, though — if Toronto falls in love with the Bills, will they abandon the Argonauts and send the Canadian Football League crashing down?

CFL commissioner Mark Cohon has already said publicly that an NFL team in Toronto would be the death knell for his 3-down, 110-yard football league. Said Cohon:

“I want to see Toronto as a prospering (CFL) franchise, which sets the bellwether for the rest of the league. I was not hired to be commissioner of a Western league.

“If you make the assumption that an NFL team would come into this market, it would cut into (the CFL’s) ad revenue, ticketing and would remove our ability to compete, as there’s a limited number of sponsorship and television money in the Canadian marketplace.”

Perhaps the real question is how important Toronto is to the CFL. If the Argos give way to the Bills, would the Hamilton Tiger-Cats fan base fall apart well? Would Montreal be too cut off from the rest of the league to allow the Alouettes to survive? Or is Cohon just being a Cassandra?

It makes sense for Toronto — a big city with a sports-crazy fan base that already has teams in the NBA, NHL, MLB and MLS — to try and lure the Bills away from Buffalo. Perhaps sports fans in Toronto think the CFL is a too much of a minor league compared to the NFL, and “Canadian-ness” might not be as important as having the best quality sports in that city.

So is this deal really the beginning of the end of the CFL? Could Canadian football survive the stampede of the Bills? Or will 3-down football up north become a relic of the 20th century?

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But I digress. This turned out to be a big weekend for popular fan-built breakaway clubs — starting with FC United of Manchester, a club I wrote about a year ago. As you may recall, FC United was built from the ground up by Manchester United supporters who objected to Malcolm Glazer’s debt-heavy financing of the Premier League club. Well, FC United just took one more step toward the Football League themselves, winning their third promotion in three years by beating Skelmersdale in a promotion playoff. Next season, FC United will play in the Unibond League Premier Division, one level below 6th-tier Conference North.

Meanwhile, another supporter-run club has already made the climb into Conference football. AFC Wimbledon was promoted to Conference South on Saturday after beating Staines Town in a promotion playoff on a dramatic 83rd-minute goal. AFC Wimbledon was built by Wimbledon FC supporters after that club made its highly controversial moved to Milton Keynes and became MK Dons — who, ironically enough, won League Two and will play in 3rd-tier League One next season.

I get the sense, though, that MK Dons can’t climb fast enough to escape the fan-built juggernaut that bears their old name. AFC Wimbledon v. MK Dons would be a dream draw in the first round of the FA Cup next year, wouldn’t it?

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Last week, the BBC published this article on why Thierry Henry has been such crap since moving to Barcelona. Aside from pining over not getting any more father-daughter time, Henry has been playing out of position and, more importantly, playing hurt.

The main cause of Henry’s recent injury troubles is a near-chronic back problem, officially diagnosed as the dehydration of an intervertebral disc, which causes lumbar and hip pain.

Former vice-president Sandro Rosell has gone as far as to say that the club made a huge mistake in signing Henry.

“Whoever signed him deserves a clip round the ear,” stated Rosell in December. “He should have been given an exhaustive medical.”

Two days later, Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing.net links to this article in New York Magazine, in which Adam Sternberg basically tells us that shoes are bad for our feet.

Look, it’s not your fault. It’s your shoes. Shoes are bad. I don’t just mean stiletto heels, or cowboy boots, or tottering espadrilles, or any of the other fairly obvious foot-torture devices into which we wincingly jam our feet. I mean all shoes. Shoes hurt your feet. They change how you walk. In fact, your feet—your poor, tender, abused, ignored, maligned, misunderstood feet—are getting trounced in a war that’s been raging for roughly a thousand years: the battle of shoes versus feet.

Last year, researchers at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, published a study titled “Shod Versus Unshod: The Emergence of Forefoot Pathology in Modern Humans?” in the podiatry journal The Foot. The study examined 180 modern humans from three different population groups (Sotho, Zulu, and European), comparing their feet to one another’s, as well as to the feet of 2,000-year-old skeletons. The researchers concluded that, prior to the invention of shoes, people had healthier feet. Among the modern subjects, the Zulu population, which often goes barefoot, had the healthiest feet while the Europeans—i.e., the habitual shoe-wearers—had the unhealthiest.

In his own post, Doctorow then revealed that he owned a pair of Vibram Fivefingers “barefoot shoes,” which look something like this:

According to Doctorow:

(These shoes) do a pretty good job of simulating the experience of going barefoot without the tetanus and laceration risk, and I’ve done a lot of city and country walking in them, and I have to say, my back and knees and feet feel pretty damned good after a couple days in them.

The Vibram web site goes on to tell the world why their shoes are so good for you:

Vibram FiveFingers footwear acts like a second skin to offer a gecko-like grip over a variety of terrain. It protects bare feet from rocks, gravel, and sharp objects. And it promotes a natural walking motion, reducing impact on your knees, hips, and lower back.

So why aren’t they making football shoes? And why isn’t Thierry Henry wearing them?

We’ve all heard the stories about star footballers taking huge amounts of money to endorse a particular brand of shoes, then suddenly suffering a raft of foot injuries. Wayne Rooney, in particular, has had enough broken metatarsals to last a lifetime, and some have suggested his shoes might be the problem.

Well, here’s a solution that claims to promote a “natural walking motion” and reduce stress to various joints. If you can run in them and go hiking and climbing in them, maybe someone should ask whether you can play soccer in them, too. Kids all over South America and Africa play football barefoot. If it’s good enough for them, why wouldn’t something similar be good enough for the professionals?

Hey, it’s Association football. You play it with your feet, and if your feet get hurt all the time, that’s no good. Maybe a Vibram Fivefingers football shoe could prevent injuries. Maybe it could give players better control of the ball. Maybe it could help Henry’s bad back and Rooney’s aching metatarsals. After all, if there’s a chance something like this can make you a strong (and healthier) player, isn’t it worth trying?

So yeah, strange connections. That’s what the Internet does to your brain. Just thought I’d share that.

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Still, this thought has been stuck in my head for the last day or two, and it’s time I got it out. It involves one of my favorite sports TV shows — ESPN’s Pardon the Interruption.

Here’s the thing: PTI co-host Michael Wilbon is afraid of sports bloggers.

“The notion of blogging scares the hell out of me… There’s no accountability….stuff isn’t edited. It just goes out there as gospel. What it is is opinion.”

Yes, that’s exactly what a worthwhile sports blog is. It’s one person or a group of people giving their opinions on the day’s sports stories. Sometimes it’s funny. Sometimes it’s thought-provoking. The good blogs, though, remain consistently entertaining and/or informative.

So how is PTI any different?

Seriously, here are two guys going through the day’s sports stories and sharing their opinions on those stories with us. Sometimes it’s funny. Sometimes it’s thought-provoking. Most of the time, it’s entertaining, or else it wouldn’t have remained on the air for so long.

When you really look at it, though, Wilbon and Tony Kornheiser are doing the exact same thing good bloggers do. They look at the headlines, offer their commentary on them, tell a joke or two and move on. Give Kornheiser hair, replace the Gabor sisters jokes with dead hooker jokes and swap the bear on the trampoline with skateboarder faceplant videos, and he is Matt Ufford.

So what really separates PTI from Deadspin and With Leather? Is it the fact that the hosts have experience in mainstream media? Plenty of bloggers do, too. Is it the fact that the hosts are held more accountable for what they say? The lack of accountability Wilbon thinks blogs have is a myth. Here’s your proof. Is it the fact that they touch upon different topics? PTI didn’t shy away from those Matt Leinart photos, did they?

How about the fact that PTI is backed by a large corporation that has to adhere to certain standards? I suppose that’s true for some folks, but guess what? I write for AOL, which is owned by a large corporation, and I can’t curse when I write for them. I can type “fuck” here all day long, sure, but if I did that on a FanHouse post, I’d probably get fired or, at the very least, suspended — the same way Kornheiser was put “on vacation” the day after he told Wilbon, “Wouldn’t you like to get it done under Oprah?”

Seriously, if a couple of guys did a show a like PTI in their living room and were as entertaining as Kornheiser and Wilbon, their show would be just as big a hit. Outside of sports, such a show exists — Diggnation. The whole show is just two guys sitting on a sofa and shooting the breeze about items that are popular on Digg, a social news web site that one of them created. (Digg, by the way, was the template for sites like Yardbarker and BallHype.) They drink beer and swear a little more, but that’s not the point. The point is that personalities of the hosts and the interplay between them made Diggnation as popular as it is today.

Likewise, the personalities of PTI’s hosts made that show so popular, and the personalities of certain bloggers makes them so popular. We’re all doing pretty much the same thing here. So why does Wilbon fear the bloggers, when in reality, he’s does the same thing a blogger does every weekday?

It might just be the label. People slap this “blog” label on certain sites to keep them separate from the big media. “Oh, we’re not like those people. We have standards and practices.” Ultimately, though, there’s really very little that separates PTI from the top sports blogs. It’s all just media — text, video, audio, photo, etc. We’re all just making media like they are, and we’re having fun doing it, or else we wouldn’t be spending so much time on this it in the first place. Some of us are still finding our voice, and some of us might be a little more vulgar than others, and but really, we’re all the same. We’re just here to watch the games and tell you what we think of them, and we hope it entertains you.

One day, I really hope Michael Wilbon understands that. I believe he can, too. Hell, three years ago, I was telling everyone I knew that soccer was evil, and now look at me.

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• Awful Announcing
• Every Day Should Be Saturday
• FanHouse
• Fire Joe Morgan
• The Run of Play
• Techdirt

The more I read about Bissinger’s tirade, though, the more one thing seems to pop up in my mind — he sounds an awful lot like music industry executives, doesn’t he?

About six months ago, Wired ran this profile of Doug Morris, CEO of Universal Music. Morris is 68 years old and has a documented history of calling iPods “repositories for stolen music.” He also served up this gem:

All the sharing of the music, right? Is it correct that people share their music, fill up these devices with music they haven’t paid for? If you had Coca-Cola coming through the faucet in your kitchen, how much would you be willing to pay for Coca-Cola? There you go. That’s what happened to the record business.

There’s one underlying and unspoken thought that connects Morris and his peers with Bissinger and his colleagues, and it’s the same thought that rattles around the heads of corporate executives across America: We don’t understand the Internet. We don’t know how to react to these changes. We prefer for things to stay as they were.

Those RIAA labels grew up in a world where they controlled the distribution, and that monopoly ensured they made all the money and had full control over the flow of music. Likewise, the newspaper and magazine columnists used to have a monopoly over opinion in sports. They could control the flow of information and shape that opinion among the people.

That doesn’t exist anymore. Any band can create a Myspace page and start selling their music right there. Any sports fan with half a brain (or less) can create a blog and start typing. The barriers to publishing have deteriorated. All it takes is cheap web space and a worthwhile product, and individuals becomes just as easy to access as the biggest media monoliths. A few of those individuals will become well-liked and well-respected, because they produce interesting and/or entertaining material. Sure, there will be dick jokes. People like dick jokes, or they wouldn’t tell them.

This frightens guys like Morris and Bissinger. They used to have final say over what was interesting and worthwhile, and thanks to this Internet thing, they don’t anymore. What makes this tragic is that they refuse to accept this fundamental change. They would rather paint their new competition as the great Satan and lure the huddled masses back to their old harbors.

Sorry, guys. The huddled masses all have blogs and Myspace pages now. We don’t want to be mere consumers anymore. We want to be creators, too. But hey, you guys are more than welcome to come join the party. It’ll be going on for a while.

UPDATE: Here’s the video.

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As the week approaches, we’re getting bombarded with scouting reports, pundit predictions and, most importantly, mock drafts. Everyone thinks they know where every player is going, so they put on the Mel Kiper Jr. wig and make their picks as if they a.) were in charge of the place and b.) had any clue what they were doing. Mel Kiper Jr. has turned us all into Mel Kiper Jr. wannabes this week — proof positive that manufacturing your job out of thin air makes you a big fat genius. (One day, we will all recognize the genius of John Ratzenberger.)

Of course, I’m not immune to the prediction game myself. I participated in not one, but two mock drafts this year — one at NFL FanHouse (natch!) and one at NBC Sports. If you’re not sick to death of this overhyped media orgy yet, go check ‘em out.

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Let me repeat that for you. AU$1.2 million a year would make Jonathan Brown the highest-paid Australian football player on the planet. Based on today’s exchange rates, $1.2 million in Australia is about $1.13 million in America. It’s also about £570,000 in England, or €712,000 in the rest of Europe.

Let’s compare this for a moment to what the Minnesota Vikings are paying Jared Allen, the Pro Bowl defensive end they just acquired from the Chiefs for three draft picks. According to reports, Allen will receive a 6-year, $74 million deal, with $31 million guaranteed. The price difference between the contracts of Jared Allen and Colts defensive end Dwight Freeney — who, IMHO, has been a better pass-rusher and will be again if he recovers from that lisfranc injury — could pay Jonathan Brown for almost two seasons.

Indeed, £570,000 wouldn’t cover Cristiano Ronaldo’s hooker budget for one season. According to futebolfinance.com (hat tip to EPL Talk for the link), the Manchester United goal machine will make in more in five weeks than Brown would make in a year. Indeed, the Red Devils have 12, count ‘em, twelve players who will make more this season than Brown would get for the life of that contract he wants. Chelsea tops that with 15 players. Five years of Jonathan Brown is worth one year of Carlo Cudicini.

Now, I’m sure the economics of Australian footy are very different than the economics of the NFL and the Premier League, both of which have far more lucrative domestic and international TV deals. Plus, the NFL and the EPL practically own football in their home nations, something the AFL doesn’t quite do yet. And let’s not lie — who among us wouldn’t be pretty happy with $1.2 million a year for 5 years?

Still, that’s quite the salary gap, isn’t it? It’s a wonder that more young AFL stars don’t consider taking their athletic abilities to other football codes. Perhaps the AFL is the last fully professional football league on the planet that’s more about the love of the game and the glory of a Saturday afternoon than the straight cash, homey. After all, if Jonathan Brown really wanted to get paid, he would have learned to be a striker or a wide receiver years ago.

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Nevertheless, I did catch some of the Geelong Cats v. Sydney Swans game over the weekend. The more I watch Geelong, the more impressed I am with their style of play. They just run right down the central corridor like a force of nature, just daring you to stop them — and you can’t do it, can you? They’re running roughshod over this league.

Other teams can slow the Cats down for a little while, which the Swans did during the 2nd & 3rd quarters, but you almost feel like the Cats are just toying with their opponents. They’re just a plastic mouse, and the Cats will pounce on it at their leisure — BOOM! Goal, goal, goal, it’s over.

That said, someone will beat the Cats this year. There have only been two NFL teams that have gone undefeated in the regular season, and only one of them won a title. (Not sure about any undefeated teams in the AFL, and honestly, I’m too lazy to look this morning.) The AFL season is a longer slog than the NFL season — 22 games v. 16 — and eventually injuries, fatigue and the pressure built up from the press will drag a team down. Better to be dragged down in the middle of the season and take the pressure off to build up for a stretch run.

Sure, every team wants to win every game they play, but ultimately, that’s not the goal. The goal is to hoist the trophy at the end of the season. We saw with the New England Patriots in America how much pressure builds up as a team builds a huge winning streak. What happened? They finally lost a close one in the Super Bowl. I’m pretty sure these Cats don’t want that.

That said, they are looking awfully unbeatable right about now. The game I want to see, though, is Geelong v. Hawthorn, July 25. Lance Franklin is just raining goals from the sky right now. That could be the game of the year, couldn’t it?

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