If you want to celebrate 1 million years of rugby league – go ahead, I’m not going to stop you. Who cares ??? “special pleading” – what kind of drugs are you on dude ?

Please explain why every time Dave posts something on AFL, you have a bash at the game’s historical roots and claiming that it will never become popular outside of Australia. You are obviously more of a historical expert than the experts themselves ! Whatever the obscure origins of a sports, it is not going to stop it from growing.

Perhaps for once you should stick to commenting on the actual blog, rather than obsessed ranting !!!

My point is that the Aussie football code nationalists engage in special pleading. They look for the very earliest glimmerings of their code in Australia, and ignore the precise same things for soccer and rugby which occurred much earlier in Britain/Ireland. You don’t apply the same logic to other codes as you do for your own. That’s called special pleading.

Sure 150 years is an arbitrary date, but they have to celebrate something. More and more evidence shows that the games origins are still very vague and can be traced back further than 150 years. The AFL recently commissioned a historical study which found among other things that despite popular belief, the contribution of Tom Wills, thought by many to be the game’s only founder is not as significant as first thought.

See: http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/sport/afl/story/0,26576,23314627-19742,00.html

The Melbourne Football Club may be the oldest, but many clubs were formed before the MFC. Especially if you count the schools that were playing the game before the formation of the MFC. The same study shows that long before the first official matches had been played, that football was played throughout much of Victoria.

The MFC is significant in that it wrote the rules and, unlike Sheffield, has now played at the elite level for every one of its 150 years.

I like how the code is allegedly “celebrating its 150th anniversary” when it is merely celebrating the birth of its oldest club. Sheffield FC is older. If aussie rules wasn’t born with the VFA, than neither was soccer born with the FA.