And the Anindilyakwa don’t take too kindly to that call, ref.

Police feared for their safety when they turned up to a disturbance at a sporting field on Groote Eylandt to discover it had escalated to a full-scale brawl.

The brawl, involving several hundred people, some of them armed with axes and spears, broke out about 5pm (CST) on Sunday at the Angurugu sports oval during an AFL match.

It is understood the feud started on the football field when one of the teams was awarded a free kick.

Ummmm… did he just say “axes and spears?”

“A number of those people were armed with axes and spears and a large number were involved in hostile and aggressive behaviour, which was later directed at police,” (Police Superintendent Brent Warren) told AAP…

“As you can imagine, even when a number of police cars turn up, when you’ve got a crowd that’s potentially 500-strong, it’s difficult to take proactive action at the time.”

Oh, come on! You’re Australian! Be a man! Get a dick!*

Okay, maybe seeing an angry mob wielding sharp weaponry would encourage even the most hearty Australian to run away from confrontation. But let’s back up a bit. What got that angry mob started? A questionable call from the ref. They hated the call so much that they absolutely had to take matters into their own hands — kind of like the Dawg Pound, if you replaced the beer bottles with, y’know, axes and spears.

Let’s just hope and pray the Anindilyakwa haven’t given SEC fans any ideas.

(Spotted on The Sporting Blog.)

* – Australian blokes here in the Triangle shouted those last two sentences at the TV a year ago when Buddy Franklin took a dive during the AFL Grand Final. True story.

It wasn’t nearly as pretty or as high-scoring as the Round 14 clash between Geelong and St. Kilda. A downpour in Melbourne coated the turf and made the ball slick, and the high stakes made it seem even slicker and made the hits seem harder. The Cats and Saints wrestled and struggled through the ugly conditions, producing a Grand Final that had all the flow of a dammed stream.

But damn if you couldn’t take your eyes off of it.

With the score deadlocked at 68-68 in the dying moments of the final frame, the match cried out for a moment of genius to determine the winner. In the end, it was Geelong who made it happen, as Matthew Scarlett kicked a wobbling ball off the turf directly to Gary Ablett Jr., who used tons of space in front of him to boot it to the goal square, where it finally found Paul Chapman, who quick-snapped it high enough to hit a scoreboard in Dallas and watched as it finally flew through the goal posts for the game winner. A late goal at the siren proved meaningless, aside from making the final score 80-68.

St. Kilda was shut down after that. The Saints proved once again that nobody could disrupt the Cats’ transition game better than they could, but in the end, they were done in by inaccuracy in the 2nd and 3rd frames, where 9 of their 15 scores were behinds. A few more goals would have changed this one considerably. Getting the ball to big center-forward Nick Riewoldt proved difficult as well, as he was triple-teamed just about every time the ball was sent inside the 50 to him.

It was the Cats’ day, however, and with two Premierships in three years, this team has cemented its place as one of the greats in footy history, and they show no signs of slowing down. As for St. Kilda, they’ll be back as well, but their first title since 1966 will have to wait.

The only question I have left is this: what were the TV ratings like in America? How many people watched and/or recorded this Grand Final here? If the numbers are good, it could help Aussie Rules build an audience here. If you see the numbers before I do, feel free to post them in the comments.

Cats the last ones standing in epic battle. (afl.com.au)

After about 10 minutes, he told us, “I like this game! It makes sense!”

This kind of reaction is what got me all excited that Aussie Rules returned to ESPN earlier this month, right after Setanta Sports went pear-shaped in the UK and started selling off properties to make ends meet in Ireland and the states. Put this game in front of people, and once they figure it out, they’ll enjoy it.

Alas, the WWL has been too busy shining its light on the Premier League to give the AFL much publicity. AFL matches have been relegated to ESPN360, and at this stage, only the Grand Final on September 26 will air on ESPN2.

This pretty much sucks for me, because ESPN360 is only available to Internet service providers willing to pay for it. In this area, that means Verizon DSL, and anyone who’s been following me on Twitter lately knows I’ve grown tired of Verizon’s shit. They’ve been degrading their DSL service to get more people to sign up for FiOS — but of course, Verizon doesn’t offer FiOS here in central North Carolina.

So I switched back to Time Warner Cable, which doesn’t offer ESPN360, but also doesn’t go down twice a day, often for hours at a time. And it’s faster. It’s a tradeoff.

If you’ve got ESPN360, bully for you. That’s a decent site for watching both live games and match replays, and it will probably show most of the Finals Series. If you’re in my shoes, however, and don’t have ESPN360, but still want to check out the entire Finals Series, you’ve got one option: AussieSport.tv. This international site serves up full match replays, highlight reels and other vids associated with the AFL, NRL and something called V8 Supercars, which I assume is Australian for NASCAR. A one-month pass to the AFL in September is only $9.95, and a 4-day trial is only $1.95.

I think I might give this a try. I’ve missed out on most of the AFL season this year, save for that St. Kilda-Geelong match and an equally epic Geelong v. Hawthorn clash in Round 17 that was decided on the last kick, but something about this year’s Final Series looks compelling — especially the potential Geelong v. Collingwood clash in the opening round. I wonder if Anthony Rocca still has the distance on those kicks.

It has been widely reported that if Australia is to host soccer’s major event, then the only stadia capable of holding adequate crowds across the various states will be AFL and NRL venues. Ironically that is because soccer has not had sufficient success to build large stadia for itself. Yet now it has re-branded itself as simply “football” and increasingly journalists are abused if they dare to refer to it as soccer (its original nickname to distinguish it from the other codes of football). Some of kind of reverse-racism is in play – where once soccer was considered a game for ethnic minorities, now to even call it by that name is seen as discriminatory, yet its supporters and administrators claim the name football for themselves. Sadly, Australia’s national broadcaster, the ABC, has fallen into line.

And the sport’s peak body will almost certainly succeed in gaining access to the major venues of Australia, if it does secure the soccer World Cup. That’s because bodies such as the AFL and NRL would be seen as, that ugly term, “un-Australian” if they didn’t support the country’s bid, and no doubt there would also be government pressure to fall into line.

Read the rest at World Footy News. The football wars never end in Australia, do they?

Is that baseball game tied after 9 innings? Play another inning. Is that basketball game tied at the end of regulation? Play another five minutes. Still not decided? Keep playing until we have a winner. Even hockey games, which used to end in draws all the time, now have overtime and shootouts in the regular season. We demand winners in this country, dammit.

It’s the same with football. Yesterday, when the Philadelphia Eagles and the Cincinnati Bengals got to the end of the sudden death overtime period and it was still tied at 13-13 — the first tie game in the NFL in 6 years — everyone dragged out the old kissing-your-sister analogy. Draws are that unsatisfying to the American sports psyche. Hell, Donovan McNabb didn’t even think it was possible for an NFL game to end in a tie.

A question for all you Premier League fans out there — were you so unsatisfied by the outcome of the Hull City v. Manchester City match yesterday? Yes, it ended in a 2-2 draw, and at times, it was an instructional video on how not to play defense, but ultimately, it was a fine result. Both teams got a point, and perhaps that point will decide whether Hull and Man City maintain their league status at the end of the season.

Of course, league status is not a concern in the NFL. The Cincinnati Bengals aren’t going to get relegated to a lower league, much as some of us would love to see it happen. The idea that every game must have a winner, though, is unique here. Rugby matches end in draws. We usually get a draw or two in the AFL every year. Do they keep playing until someone wins? No, they accept the outcome and move on with their lives. If it were a playoff game or a cup tie, then sure, you have to play until there’s a winner. A regular season game? Nah, screw it. We’ll just split the points and move on.

Ah, but there are no points on offer in American football. There are only wins and losses. Perhaps that’s why the NCAA abolished ties and introduced its overtime system in 1996. That system eliminates all possibility of a tie. The NFL sudden-death OT system? Close, but not quite.

Perhaps if the NFL created a points system like the AFL has — 4 points for a win, 2 points for a draw — we wouldn’t worry about whether OT is necessary in a regular season game. We’ll just look at the points and determine who goes to the playoffs from that, and if certain teams have the same number of points, we’ll give them a extra point for a tiebreaker and move on.

This sort of system comes with a side benefit — the ability to dock teams points if they break the rules. What’s that? More than three of your players have been popped for using performance-enhancing drugs? WHAM! 5-point deduction. Oh, what’s this? You’ve been illegally videotaping your opponents for the last 5 years? WHAM! 25-point deduction. Now you have to go 16-0 just to get a Wild Card spot. Suddenly, the Hammer of Goodell doesn’t seem quite so Nerf-like, is it?

Will the NFL ever go in this direction? Don’t hold your breath. If anything, that Bengals-Eagles game will be an excuse for the NFL to reconsider the college overtime policy and ensure that there will never be a draw in the NFL ever again. Americans demand victors. It’s just how we are.

There’s been a lot of focus this year on violence in the NFL — hard hits, horrific injuries, past players looking for ways to prevent future concussions, bounties on players, new rules that may or may not be “pansying up” the game, and so on.

It’s all quite absurd, really. Those who prattle on about the violence of the gridiron game seem to forget that it is violence. It’s a brutal tactical war game that requires players to collide into each other at the fastest possible speed to stop an opponent — something players learn at a very young age.

For as bad as it looks now, though, American football was much worse a century ago. There was no padding, very little forward passing, and far more brutal battles in the trenches.

That might be one reason why the New York Times took a look at the state of American football and thought, hey, maybe those Aussies have a better idea.

“Practically a similar summing up as that of the major’s is the consensus among the Californians who have seen the game as demonstrated as it is now being taught on the coast. Its general absorption of most of the other types of contests with the leather spheroid has proved the rule whenever the issue was football”, wrote the Times.

“If we Americans want a safe and sane game of football we can do no better than to emulate the Australian style of game”, Major Peixotto says. “It is almost as open as lacrosse, as changeable as basketball, presents almost as many dribbling chances as the association game (soccer), and admits of no such close formations as exist under our college rules, and which, because of their tendency toward injuries, have raised such a hue and cry against the game”

Sure, it was published in 1910, and the old Major had something to sell people back then, but still, it makes you wonder just how many people would be more than happy to make the same arguments today. Perhaps the only difference is the number of deaf ears on which those arguments would fall. For all its faults, we’re still committed to the gridiron game around here. It’s enough to make you think we might be having too much fun with all this violence.

You can read the full Times article here. Nobody writes like that anymore. I wonder why.

Gee, what could have made them think that? Maybe this?

Some folks will disagree with me on this — particuarly this guy and this guy — but that’s because they only see this game through the filter of their own football code. If they stopped and looked at this from a neutral viewpoint, though, they might see a football code that has much more potential than is on display in this Australia v. Ireland test matches. International Rules requires a rare combination of speed, strength, agility and creativity that you don’t usually see in other codes. Yes, the play looked sloppy at times on Friday, but that’s because we’re dealing with two teams playing this particular brand of football for the first time in two years — and the rules have changed yet again, so even now it’s not the same.

If these two nations played this particular football code year-round, however, International Rules might develop into a uniquely entertaining game. We could see coaches come up with game plans and see players execute clever moves that would excite the fans to no end. We could see a form of football that would blossom into something new and exciting.

Imagine for a moment if this were the dominant football code on the planet. Imagine someone like Wayne Rooney was running around up front, taking marks and nailing overs like he used to nail middle-aged hookers. Imagine if Troy Polamalu were darting around the midfield, tackling any ball carrier coming his way. Imagine what Bryan Habana could do with a round ball and a little bit of space on the sideline.

We’ll never get to see that. Australia has its code, Ireland has its code, everyone else has their codes, and that’s that. We already have two truly international football games — soccer and rugby — and nobody really wants to explore the possibilities of any new codes. Why inject a bunch of new rules into football when the old rules seem to work just fine for everyone?

That’s a shame. Given a little bit of room to breathe, I think International Rules could be a great football game. I guess I’m alone alone in that regard.

Apparently, when International Rules Football was played in Croke Park in 2004, it wasn’t just a competition between two nations, but two species. Football is more fun when there’s a dog in the game, isn’t it? We should have canine pitch invaders in the Premier League every week.

I’ll have more to say about last Friday’s International Rules test match a bit later, but suffice to say, I feel a bit differently about it than this guy.

Yes, the hybrid of Australian Football and Gaelic Football — which could have been something interesting if it hadn’t degenerated into an on-the-pitch brawl every year — will be played in Perth tomorrow and in Melbourne next week, and the Irish team is already vowing to get physical with the Aussies. The Australian side, meanwhile, is saying it plans to tackle within the rules, but it’s damn near impossible to know what those rules are by now. This could just be Gaelic Football with marking and behind posts. It makes you wonder how many times the AFL and GAA can restart this party before people just get annoyed by it.

If you want to watch this spectacle in the US, it’ll be on Setanta Sports live early Friday morning, with a replay at 6:00 PM ET. Same goes for next weekend. Given the Premier League slate this weekend — most of the interesting games are on Sunday, thanks to the Champions League and European N.I.T. schedule — it might be worth saving for Saturday morning. Nothing like waking up to a little cartoon violence on Saturday, no?

I suppose you could say that these Melbourne Victory supporters got their wish, except there was no fire. The Telstra Dome in Melbourne is no longer the Telstra Dome. A new naming rights deal with UAE-based Etihad Airlines has made this building Etihad Stadium.

Come to think of it, all the stadium management has done is ruin a perfectly good protest chant. Bastards.

From the Who-thought-THIS-was-a-good-idea dept.:

RICHMOND is poised to share the same jumper sponsor as the world’s biggest sporting club, Manchester United.

The Tigers are set to announce a lucrative deal with global insurance and financial services giant AIG (American International Group). Richmond has signed a heads of agreement with the Australian arm of the American-based company. …

The arrangement was struck despite AIG being hit by the credit squeeze, requiring an $85 billion bailout by the US Government.

There it is, America. Your tax dollars are now paying for the logo of a failed investments company to be sewn into the jumper of an Aussie Rules team that hasn’t had a whiff of the AFL Finals Series since 2001. Hey, that’s a perfect match!

Here in the states, people who have never heard of Manchester United are yelling insults at guys Wayne Rooney jerseys solely because of that AIG logo. If you’re a Richmond supporter, I highly recommend you contact the club and tell them you won’t be buying any Tigers gear with AIG’s logo on it. That’s the last logo anyone anywhere wants to see right now.

UPDATE: AIG has pulled out of the deal.

Well, it was more fun to watch than last year’s Grand Final — unless, of course, you’re a Geelong supporter.

When Geelong and Hawthorn met back in July, the Hawks missed a few key scoring opportunities, and when too many shots at 6-point goals result in 1-point behinds, it’ll cost you. This time around, though, it was the Cats’ turn to be inaccurate. A long stretch in the 2nd quarter resulted in 11 consecutive behinds for Geelong, which gave the Hawks a 51-48 lead at halftime and the impetus to pull away in the 2nd half and notch a 115-89 victory in the 2008 AFL Grand Final.

Not that Hawthorn wasn’t happy to concede behinds all night. The Hawks seemed to have trouble pushing forward from their own goal square. Most of us watching at Woody’s in Raleigh blamed it on lack of motion an inaccurate kicking in the midfield. As a result, the Hawks spent a lot of time stepping behind their own posts for rushed behinds. As it turned out, that strategy stole Geelong’s rhythm and kept the game close until Hawthorn’s 6-goal outburst in the 3rd quarter. Hawthorn took the air out of the ball in the 4th to preserve the win.

Geelong did manage to take Buddy Franklin out of the game in the first half, but clearly, there was more to Hawthorn than Buddy. Hawthorn out-kicked, out-marked and out-tackled Geelong in the end, and once Franklin finally got himself open, he kicked two key goals in the 2nd half.

All in all, it was a fun night. Big thanks to the North Carolina Tigers for hosting the Grand Final party again this year. Judging from the scowls of the Geelong girls as they quietly walked out of the pub, though, I think I had more fun than they did.

Take a look at this catch by Morgan State wide receiver Edwin Baptiste…

In this instance, the quarterback was leading the receiver forward. The receiver got ahead of the defense, looked back for the ball and made that ridiculous play.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen that in an AFL match. In most cases, a potential receiver who gets away from his defender is always coming toward the ball, or the kicker boots it to a specific spot and lets players congregate underneath and fight for it. You never see anyone kick a ball with an eye on a receiver moving toward the goal.

I’m curious as to why that is. Is it because players running forward have a harder time taking a mark? Do players who run forward attract more defenders? Does the nature of the game convince coaches that you only have to move forward enough to get in goal-kicking range, thus allowing forwards the freedom to give up 10-15 meters if they’re still able to mark inside the 50? Perhaps some of you out there can explain that one to me.

In the meantime, coverage of the AFL Grand Final kicks off at 11:30 PM ET tonight on Setanta Sports. If you don’t have Setanta or can’t find a pub nearby that carries it, give AussieSport TV a try. Here’s hoping Hawthorn does what last year’s Port Adelaide Power couldn’t — make a game of it against Geelong.

Last year, Geelong utterly demolished the Port Adelaide Power in one of the most lopsided Grand Finals in Australian history. This year, it ought to be different. Hawthorn played Geelong really close a few weeks ago and might have won but for a few key missed shots at goal. If Buddy Franklin can avoid those bad misses this time around, it could very well go the other way.

Or is that wishful thinking? Seriously, nobody wants another blowout this year. We want our Grand Finals to go right down to the wire, like the Sydney v. West Coast battles in 2005 and 2006. After all, I’m going to be up until 3:00 in the morning at a Grand Final party in a bar in downtown Raleigh, and the last thing I need is a game that will put me right to sleep.

That’s on you, Hawks. Try to make a game of it this time, okay?

“Why, God!? Why didn’t I start Jonathan Stewart instead of DeAngelo Williams this week!?”

So the second weekend of September has passed, and I’m still bleary-eyed from hanging out at the Blues at the Beach Festival in Virginia Beach with about 100 of my closest Facebook friends. I never made it to CP Shuckers as I had planned on Friday when I wrote that open thread post, instead catching fleeting glimpses of the Panthers-Bears game on my less-than-reliable cell phone. (I like my Slingbox. My Treo? Not so much.) The superstitious and cowardly side of my brain is telling me never to set foot in CP Shuckers on game day again.

This year’s Panthers have now come back twice in the 4th quarter against very good teams. In fact, we’ve already seen a repeat of two things that happened in 2003 — the Panthers won their first game on the last play of the game (also a Jake Delhomme touchdown pass), and the Panthers have won their home opener. One more late comeback win, and the tag “Cardiac Cats” will be far from inappropriate.

Oh, by the way, they did all this without Steve Smith. He returns to the lineup next week. I hope he washes his drawers before then.

You’ll excuse me if I start grinning a little too much. The Panthers, the Steelers, and my fantasy team are all 2-0. I can’t ask for a better start than that, really.

I didn’t get to see any Premier League or AFL Finals action over the weekend, though I did meet a woman who barracks for the St. Kilda Saints. She had quite the fatalist attitude about her club in the Finals, saying the team was always less than the sum of its parts and figuring it would just be better if the Saints didn’t get her hopes up and made their usual quick exit. I never got to tell her that the Saints actually beat Collingwood on Saturday. Of course, she’ll probably say they’ll never get past Hawthorn now, but hey, at least they got to a Preliminary Final, right?

In the meantime, let’s not make too much of Hull City in a European spot on the Premier League table right now, okay? Hull is in fifth place after Aston Villa beat dead-last Tottenham today and leaped into 4th place. The Tigers might yet survive the drop, but does anyone really believes they’ll come up with 60+ points in their first-ever top-flight season? I still wouldn’t put them on 42+ right now.

I’ll have some videos later, but for now, I leave you with another fine piece of comedy from our pal MJD — a letter from Ed Hochuli’s pit bull. MJD’s Chargers are not off to as good a start as my teams. You might say that’s coming against the run of play. They have reason to be upset at Ed Hochuli. They should be mad at themselves, though, for letting that chick from Clerks 2 put one over on them.

I didn’t see that game, though. After watching the first half of East Carolina’s drubbing of West Virginia yesterday, I went to the pregame tailgate for the Carolina Railhawks v. Charleston Battery game. Our Railhawks actually won it, 3-1, taking advantage of a Battery side still drained from losing the U.S. Open Cup Final. It was the perfect result, too, because now we only need a draw in Charleston in two weeks to keep the Southern Derby Cup for a second straight year. Sure, it’s worth less than the Emirates Cup, but this club has only been around for two years, and we’ll take any hardware we can get — especially since we probably won’t make the USL playoffs this year.

Then I cleaned myself off at a nearby convenience store, changed my shirt and went to a friend’s 30th birthday party. She was drunk and bubbly and wearing a tiara, and she didn’t give a shit about football, or much of anything aside from the next martini, really. Her Swedish boyfriend was a little freaked out by this. We all ended up at a meat market bar where a decent cover band with a hot chick singing lead got everyone partying. We ended up at Waffle House after last call, where I talked soccer and poker with someone’s new boyfriend.

By the time I finally got home, it was 3:30 AM. I woke up at 11:00 AM, dragged my ass out of bed and turned on the TV. Sunday NFL Countdown was already on, and Week 1 was about to begin in earnest. This is the football I grew up with, the football America grew up with. Suddenly, all those other football codes didn’t matter too much. That’s when I knew what I had to do…

Bleary-eyed and hungry, I’m packing up this laptop and heading down to a nearby watering hole, where I will be parking my ass for the next 7 hours or so. There’s a Cover It Live liveblog after the jump. It goes live at 12:15 or so. Stop by and say hey.

UPDATE (12:45 PM): Cover It Live is choking on the Wi-Fi in this pub. I am not pleased with this development…

So how about an Australian Football World Cup?

We got a glimpse of that this past week with the AFL International Cup, which just completed last night in Melbourne with Papua New Guinea’s come-from-behind win against New Zealand in the Grand Final. It was the third such competition that the AFL has organized, and it featured 16 nations from around the world taking a stab at a form of football few people know outside of Australia — including the USA, who dominated early but ended up finishing 7th after close losses to South Africa and the tiny Pacific Island of Nauru.

While the level of play has been compared to amateur Victorian footy — and I dare say that was actually a compliment — it’s been suggested that this competition could be a springboard to an honest-to-goodness Aussie Rules World Cup, which would include a limited Australian team, too.

Someone should think about it. The AFL is shattering attendance records every year, international interest in the game is growing, movie stars are coming out for games, and even American blogs are having a go at misbehaving AFL players. (You might not want to click on that link if your boss is nearby…)

The AFL deserves some credit for organizing grass roots programs in other countries to attract more athletes to play the game — their program in South Africa is proving very successful — but in the long run, it’s going to need to do more than that. The AFL needs to get its game more TV coverage around the world. Things like this help, but that only appeals to those who are already fans. If you can get the AFL off Setanta and onto a basic cable network like Versus or Spike, it will find an audience. Aussie Rules is fairly easy to figure out and a lot of fun to watch, and it takes place during a time of year when American football fans have nothing but Arena Football to keep them going until the next season. Some of them would definitely prefer the AFL to, say, the Premier League.

Granted, American TV doesn’t seem to be a priority for the AFL, which has enough issues at home. Still, the world is getting smaller, and this International Cup attracted 16 nations, or 10 more than the American Football World Cup had last year. You have to think that this will convince the AFL to start expanding into more international TV markets soon. That’s when we’ll see this form of football get even bigger.

In the meantime, how’s about we organize a Six Nations competition for Aussie Rules? Because there was a huge discrepancy in talent at this International Cup. Let’s just get PNG, New Zealand, South Africa, Ireland, Canada and the USA together every year for a battle. That couldn’t hurt things.

Lance “Buddy” Franklin kicked 8 goals to lead the Hawthorn Hawks to a 127-76 win over the Western Bulldogs. I watched one half of this game, and really, that was all I needed to see. Hawthorn simply moved the ball around better and created, oh, about 800 times more scoring opportunities than the Bulldogs. Quite frankly, the ‘dogs looked overmatched and possibly a little lost. Who knew Jim Zorn was coaching Aussie Rules, too?

If this is how the Bulldogs looked against Hawthorn, how do they expect to get past Geelong in two weeks? That’s assuming they even get there, as they have to face the winner of tomorrows Sydney Swans v. North Melbourne Kangaroos elimination final. Western split two with Sydney and lost to Melbourne on a last-minute miss by Brad Johnson, so at least we’ll get a close game before Geelong pounds the crap out of the winner the following week.

And trust me, Geelong will be there. The St. Kilda Saints inspire more false hope than the New Orleans Saints. Let’s just hope they don’t inspire more cringing than the Utah Saints on Sunday.

Most Australian Football pundits figured we would never see another player kick 100 goals in a season, what with the way the game has evolved since the birth of the AFL in 1990 — more handballs, stronger defensive play, etc.

Lance “Buddy” Franklin put the lie to all that by kicking his 100th goal last night in Hawthorn’s final game of the regular season, the first player to do so since Jason Dunstall in 1996 and only the 28th player (and the youngest ever) to reach the century mark in 150 years of Australian Football. Naturally, that goal sparked a big fat 100-goal pitch invasion. It’s tradition down under.

We almost saw a second pitch invasion for Brendan Fevola, but thanks to some first-half accuracy issues, he finished the season just behind Franklin with 99 goals. Matthew Pavlich of Fremantle and Daniel Bradshaw of Brisbane tied for third with … wait for it … 67 goals. Yeah, Buddy and Fev are pretty good. Only Buddy, though, will move on to the Finals Series next weekend.

So how has Geelong done it the last two years? Like every football club on the planet, they’re always looking for an edge, and maybe this is it: infrared heat vests.

The Jett Heat Vest is designed to accelerate metabolism, improve circulation and provide warmth. It has been approved by Racing Victoria for use in trackwork, with jockeys such as Damien Oliver and Darren Gauci wearing the vest to lose weight and relieve muscle soreness and back-related problems.

Physiotherapist Bruce Cohen said trials of the vest were just another small way of staying ahead of the pack. “Physios have long used infra-red treatment and to make that mobile is an exciting concept,” said Cohen, who also works for Geelong as a forward scout. “The vests increase blood flow which can help resolve soft tissue issues.”

Y’know, these vests would be way cooler if they came in orange. That way, the Cats could all look as cool as Marty McFly.

These vests, which were designed down under, actually seem a bit similar to The Glove, which regulates body temperature and helps athletes cool down more quickly after workouts. Kind of makes you wonder what would happen if Geelong combined those two things. They might have actually beaten Collingwood that one time.

Now we just have to find a way to use this technology on Wayne Rooney’s feet, Chad Johnson’s shoulder and Shawn Merriman’s brain.

Between those two things and Stuart Holden’s dumb foul at the end of the Netherlands game, the USA earned its trip home here. I hope Nowak earned a pinkslip.

US Open Cup: No quadruple for the New England Revolution. D.C. United topped New England, 3-1, in a game seen by less than 7,000 people. (Thanks for nothing, MLS.) Meanwhile, on a rainy night in Charleston, SC, the Seattle Sounders took the Charleston Battery to penalty kicks, and the Battery came out on top. The Open Cup Final between D.C.U. and the Battery takes place on Wednesday, September 3, at RFK Stadium. It will probably be D.C.U.’s only chance to win a trophy and make the 2009 CONCACAF Champions League.

Premier League: Dimitar Berbatov is headed to Manchester United. (Was that deal ever not going to happen?) Meanwhile, Tottenham Hotspur has not yet secured Andrei Arshavin from Zenit St. Petersburg. Expect even more “SPURS GET BENT” headlines from British Tabloids.

AFL: The Sydney Swans just signed 24-year-old Canadian rugby fullback Mike Pyke to their rookie list. Their next target: Chris Chambers…

Dude can mark. Ha ha.

Programming Note: Blogging will be light for the rest of the week, as I’m off to Las Vegas for a few days. I’ll have something resembling a Premier League preview up on Friday, but that will probably be about it until next week. On a side note, I made a grand total of $3.06 yesterday from my banner ad network, thanks to this Stuart Scott karaoke post. I’d promise not to spend it all in one place, but really, I’ve got a lot of postcards to buy…

The NFL preseason is still a horrific bore.

Harry Redknapp is still the master of the of the ugly 0-0 draw.

Manchester United still need Wayne Rooney and Cristiano Ronaldo.

Reading still can’t score a damn goal.

Peter Nowak-coached teams still put themselves in bad positions needlessly.

Carolina Railhawks manager Scott Schweitzer still has no bloody clue who his best 11 players are.

The Geelong Cats still own the rest of the AFL. (And the Melbourne Demons still suck.)

South Africa’s rugby union team is still pretty good.

Any Cleveland Brown who has an open wound is still at heavy risk for a staph infection.

Ronaldo is still a fat bastard.

So take comfort, football lovers. The new season is upon us, and all those old tropes we love to lean on so much aren’t going away any time soon. (Though I sure wish Schweitzer would…)