For the first week of this new blog format, we’ll take a look at the six most popular football games on the planet, in no particular order but the one I choose, and give a brief overview of where they come from and where they might be going.
Somewhere in the Land Down Under, there are people in high places who want you to believe that Association Football is “the only true football” — and how could that be if you can’t kick a guy in the shins, hmm? — and therefore it’s the only form of football that should be promoted on the continent. A couple of good runs in the World Cup will give you just this sort of ego.
The soccerroo onslaught, however, hasn’t even put a dent in the audience for Aussie Rules. In fact, as of last year, the Australian Football League has the highest per capita attendance of any sports league on the planet, and most indicators suggest that these attendance figures are stilll growing.
In America, though, Aussie Rules is still thought of as some bizarre afterthought that used to be shown on ESPN in the early 80s. That’s patently unfair. Once you figure out what’s actually happening on that oval pitch, you realize that Aussie Rules is really fun to watch. It’s a high-action, high-scoring, high-contact game that doesn’t get nearly enough respect here in the Northern Hemisphere, because nobody here really understands the rules.
So what are those rules, anyway?
(More after the jump.)
For all you confused Northern Hemisphere residents, here are the basics:
You start with a large oval pitch that’s almost twice the size of an American football field. At either end of the pitch are four goal posts. (Pictured above.) The object is to kick the ball through the center goal posts; that’s a goal, and that’s 6 points. If you kick the ball between the side goal posts or hit the center uprights, that’s a behind, which is only 1 point. A behind is also called a “miss” by the announcers; kicking accuracy is kind of important in this game.
Two teams of 18 players go at it on the pitch, and there’s no offside rule, so players can go pretty much anywhere on the pitch. The game starts with a “center bounce,” which is kind of like a tip-off in basketball, except the ref bounces the ball in the center square, and two big guys called ruckmen fight to tip the ball to their teammates.
Once a guy gets the ball, he has four options:
- He can run with the ball, but he has to bounce it off the turf every 10 meters or so.
- He can kick the ball to a teammate or through the goal.
- He can “handpass” the ball, which is an underhand punch of the ball. (It’s gotta be punched, too. Laterals are for rugby, punk.)
- He can stand there and get his ass tackled.
Of course, he can only get tackled between the shoulders and thighs. If a player goes for the head or knees, that’s a penalty and a free kick for his opponent.
There’s a basic concept in Aussie Rules called the mark. If a player makes a clean catch of another player’s kick, he can take a mark, back up from the spot of the catch and make a free kick. He only has about 5 seconds to make that kick, though, before the ref shouts, “Play on!” And if a player gets a mark within 50 meters of the goalposts — sort of an end zone, if you will — that player gets a free kick for goal. That’s when most of the points are scored.
The concept of marking the ball was swiped taken from an aboriginal Australian game called Marn Grook. English settlers watched in wonder as one aboriginal kicked a stuffed possum skin high into the air, and others jumped up to catch it. Whoever caught it got to kick it next. The settlers liked that idea and tried to spread the idea to their own football games, starting with the Cambridge Rules code of 1848. It never really caught on in England, but the Aussies loved it and ran with it, forming the first Aussie rules code in 1859 — a full four years before the Football Association formed in London.
Why this game never caught on anywhere else remains a mystery to me, really. Despite a small group of devoted followers in America, Aussie Rules remains a primarily Australian obsession. Perhaps it’s because of the name; by its nature, “Aussie Rules” implies it may not be suitable for non-Australians. That’s a shame, too, since the growing AFL audience down under ought to be able to spread this game around a bit more. I mean, if the EPL can find an audience on American cable TV, surely the AFL could, too, right? Not too many sporting events in 2006 were more exciting than those matches between the Sydney Swans and the West Coast Eagles — especially in the Finals Series last September.
Somebody get the boys at Versus on the horn. I think I have a programming idea for them — one that will hopefully let me watch the games legally. My ISP frowns upon all that BitTorrent usage…
(For the record, I’ve thrown my hat in with the Eagles, because the Swans’ fight song uses the same melody as the Notre Dame fight song. Notre Dame waitlisted me, and thus, singing that melody is unacceptable — even though I think Barry Hall is badass.)
