With T.O.’s not-a-suicide attempt, Chris Simms’ spleen, Terrence Kiel’s “lean”, Shaun Alexander’s faith and Jeff Fisher’s upcoming T-shirt purchase dominating American sports headlines this week, you probably had no clue that the Australian Football League Grand Final was taking place tomorrow night.
And why should you? To the American sports audience, this is just some obscure, foreign football game played on the other side of the planet. It was filler material on ESPN back in the 1980s, before the network got the television rights to more exciting stuff — like poker and darts. Obviously, if it couldn’t catch on then, there must have been something wrong with it, right?
Wrong. Once you actually learn a little about how Aussie Rules is played — Wikipedia has a really good primer on the game here — you realize that there’s a reason that the Australian Football League has the highest per capita attendance for any football league on the planet, including the NFL and the English Premier League. AFL games are a lot of fun to watch — continuous action, athletic plays, lots of scoring, hard-hitting tackles, and as the play-by-play men like to say, “lots of courage required.”
This is especially true of matches between the two teams in the Grand Final, the Sydney Swans and the West Coast Eagles, whose last three postseason matches (including last year’s Grand Final) have been decided by four points or less. So when these two teams face off in what’s essentially the Super Bowl of the South Pacific, you can expect a very close, very interesting game.
If you want to watch the Grand Final, it will air in America on Setanta Sports, a premium international sports network offered on DirecTV. Chances are there’s a sports bar in your neck of the woods that subscribes to Setanta Sports, so ask around. Grand Final coverage begins Friday at 11:30 PM Eastern, 8:30 PM Pacific.
You may also want to take a few minutes to check out streaming replays of previous AFL Finals Series matches at BigPond TV. Select the AFL Channel in the left-hand column and browse around a bit. I highly recommend the Week 1 Eagles-Swans qualifying final. (If you’re wondering how those two teams can meet in the first round of the postseason then again in the final, take a look at the AFL Final Series bracket. Suffice to say, the top four teams in the regular season get rewarded mightily for that.)
Seriously, if the EPL can develop a strong cult following in America, there’s no reason the AFL couldn’t do the same. I’m going to pay more attention to the Australian game when the 2007 AFL season starts next March. It’ll probably be more entertaining to follow than that other AFL.
