Dave’s Football Blog

The future of rugby union in the southern hemisphere appears to be up in the air. Super Rugby is considering a complete overhaul to try and revive sagging interest in club rugby union in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. At the same time, the Tri Nations series could expand and add more nations, but it faces one key problem:

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?

The AFL Hall of Fame Tribute Match takes place this weekend at Melbourne Cricket Ground, part of Australian football’s whole 150th anniversary celebration. A team of AFL players from Victoria will square off on a team of AFL players from … well, pretty much everywhere else in Australia and the world, really, and ultimately, this game asks us a very important question: is a half-assed State of Origin game better than no State of Origin at all?

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.

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

A couple of weeks ago, those lovable scamps at Kissing Suzy Kolber lashed out at Canada for trying to lure the Buffalo Bills north of the border. The Bills, of course, struck a $78 million deal with the city of Toronto, which will allow the city to host eight Bills games at the SkyDom… uh, the Rogers Centre over the next five years.

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?

Football is supposed to be something for the fans — especially the fans that inhale half an orange smoke bomb and spend the next nine days developing a nasty hacking cough that won’t go away, but hey, our boys got the win and I’m not dead yet, so it’s all good…

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?