Apr 12 2007
That’s Not Cricket
Part 4 in a series on how our playing fields shaped our football games.
If you’re looking for a reason why Aussie Rules may never truly catch on in America, look no further than Subiaco Oval.
This cavernous arena in Perth is the home of two AFL teams — the West Coast Eagles and the Fremantle Dockers. It’s also the largest playing field in all the AFL, with a playing surface 176 meters long and 122 meters wide. By comparison, the ovals at Melbourne Cricket Ground, Telstra Dome and Telstra Stadium are only 160 meters long, and the Sydney Cricket Ground oval is a mere 149 meters long. (Before West Coast won the Grand Final last year, some pundits speculated that the Eagles’ huge home field had something to do with their inability to win a title in the smaller MCG.)
Now, name one major American stadium that could hold a playing field as big as the Sydney Cricket Ground. We’re talking 163 yards by 149 yards. I’ll give you a minute to go Googling…
You can’t find one, can you?
You can thank blame the game of cricket for this. Cricket was it in Australia back in the 19th century, way before football showed up. All of the major AFL stadia are used for cricket as well as Aussie Rules. In fact, the first Australian football club, the Melbourne Football Club, was an offshoot of the Melbourne Cricket Club, and its members determined that football should be used to help cricketers stay in shape during the winter months. As a result, they wrote a football code that allowed them to use cricket ovals as the field of play, thus allowing for continued use of said ovals throughout the year.
Cricket ovals, like baseball fields, can vary widely in shape and size, which is how you get such huge discrepancies between Subiaco Oval and Sydney Cricket Ground. You won’t find this sort of variation in gridiron-based games or in rugby league. Association football allows for some variation in pitch size, as does Gaelic football on a lesser scale, but rarely does pitch size variation give teams a home field advantage in those games as it does in Aussie Rules.
Regardless, the required size of the playing field makes it nigh-impossible for the AFL to export its unique brand of football to the rest of the world, because neither Wembley nor Rose Bowl could fit an official AFL game. And it’s all because of cricket, a sport far more baffling and thus, far less awesome to an ignorant yank like me. It just doesn’t seem right, I tell ya…
Part 3 of
Part 2 of 
So the other day I was looking around the interwebs for some info about the new Wembley Stadium, and I came across something that made me do a double-take. According to 
