So Friday for lunch I walked into the lounge and turned on the tv to see what was on. To my surprise the first NFL game of the year was playing. This shouldn't have been that shocking as I'm in a fantasy football league and drafted nearly two weeks earlier but it still was because you don't hear any stories/analysis on America sports over here. So the sports / going ons really just slip my mind. Also the fact it was on at 12 noon on a Friday is just a tad bit weird and the fact they were playing American football on Aussie tv too. The next person that came into the lounge happened to be an Australian girl so I asked if they had ever seen American football. The extent of her knowledge which is typical of Australians maybe most in the world outside America is what they see from American television which basically boils down to them knowing it's big guys with a lot of pads.
Over here they play what's called "footy" or the Australian Football League. In Victoria, it's the most popular sport far ahead of both rugby and cricket. It is spreading to the other states as more teams are added each year. There are major differences between the two. The biggest difference probably come from a couple things:
- it's an oval field that's 170m long
- the ball is moved forward primarily by kicking
- they don't wear pads
- if a clean catch is made it's called a mark which results in a free kick if wanted or you can just keep playing
- two sets of goal posts (the inners are 6pts if kicked through or 1pt if it hits the ground or a player; the outers are always 1pt if it goes through)
- it's extremely fast paced game where the ball is constantly moving similar to say basketball (with the final scores actually typically being from 60-120).
Explaining it without watching a game is really hard but that should give some idea. As our NFL season is starting the AFL over here is just ending with the semifinals coming up next weekend.
Cheers
