Welcome to my Footy blog. This blog, I hope, will serve a dual purpose. I am hoping to educate my fellow Americans on how Australian football works, as well as report on the game in the United States.Australian rules Football is a cousin, or brother of American football, both being originally derived from Rugby. Currently, footy more closely resembles rugby than its American counterpart, however, both offer fast paced, full-contact action...one of the big differences being the lack of protective equipment in footy.
The field, shown right, is also (obviously) different. The playing field may be as much as 135-185m long and 110-155m wide. The centre square is 50x50 with a center point where the ruck plays (this would be like a more physical version of the center in basketball). There is also a curved line 50m away from the goal line. Adjacent goal posts, of which there are four, are 6.4 metres apart.
If a player splits the middle set of uprights on a kick, that's worth six points (a goal) towards the final score. The outer uprights count for one (a behind). Also counting for a behind: and ball off the posts count for one, if a defender touches or kicks the ball resulting in the ball passing through any part of the posts, or if the offensive player touches the ball with any part of his body above the knee before it goes between the goal posts.
Typically, most American teams parallel the season played in Australia, playing from March through Nationals in October (the AFL in Australia holds the Grand Final, their version of th
e Super Bowl at the end of September).There is a very in depth entry at Wikipedia outlining the rules of the game, please, if you want to learn more about the rules, do visit - I even ganked some of the above from that site. I will get more into the rules myself at a later date.
For now, I'm going to address what a newcomer to the sport is likely to see. For the unfamiliar, the sport looks more like a hybrid of soccer, rugby, and basketball and is difficult to follow at first. The game is fast-paced, looks chaotic, and is violent. As non-sensical as the game looks when you first come to it, once you begin to get familiar
with it, you begin to see strategies unfold, and notice that teams play different styles of ball.Currently there exist almost 50 club teams with over a thousand participants playing the sport in North America under the banner of the USAFL - United States Australian Football League. That doesn't include affiliated youth and women's clubs.
Anyone out there interested, I would love to hear from you at kevinmjsmith@gmail.com, or just post a message in comments. Thanks.
Top photo, courtesy of the Philadelphia Hawks, bottom photo taken by Kelly Fowler.
