ust by the way has anyone good a good reason *cough* excuse why the Ned men are wearing Blue not Orange? Or how Germany’s strip looks worryingly like St Georges or St Helens or Wigan RLFC’s with that red Vee

Just by the way has anyone good a good reason *cough* excuse why the Ned men are wearing Blue not Orange? Or how Germany’s strip looks worryingly like St Georges or St Helens or Wigan RLFC’s with that red Vee?

Yeah been a while (away of course 😉 ) and this is the stuff that used to keep me coming back…what was it three times a week…I dunno can’t quite remember, but I used to be quite the regular ;). But tell me how is it even possible that a Millennial (which is a term that seems to have taken off versus my own notion of Generation X the second, which in the alphabet of the future will follow Y just as it precedes it 😛 ) is actually interested in Rugby Union?

It’s never struck me as analogous to any post Sopranos TV programme or radio hit, but more as a game of chess played at about the speed of the world championships (sorry you Rugby Leaguies out there who like to discredit its intellectual dimensions). These Game of Thrones era telenovellas which while they are smart, are actually designed as you say to be consumed by the season in short spans of time). I thought that maybe people your age were a little interested in Rugby, but not willing to philosophise about it and certainly not daring to proselytise on behalf of it!

I notice you didn’t in any way respond to his other comments of don’t cry so much over a traditionally losing battle. Rugby has plenty of potential growth in Oz but it requires a team in all main cities/a presence in all other regional cities in order to catch those who can’t or won’t make the AFL etc. If the AFL is doing this in the traditional Rugby nurseries maybe it’s time for it to start going both ways…which again reqs a BBL minimum of all major cities with a team or as direct feeders for the Super Provinces.

If you’re going to use the small argument you probably need to know that RL is bigger in South Auckland because of the ethnic thing more than anything else as generally speaking it’s played by Maori and Pacific Islanders with a few cross-coders like Simon Mannering 😉

Yeah but both Boston and Chicago’s both teams were and are notoriously losing-minded. But you’ve also got the hardest system in terms of inequality to overcome the division/league splitting which actually created the pinstriped monster and quite possibly led to an infection American sports leagues are still having to overcome.

Also if it was only that simple Sheek, just hope you were born in the right era in order to see your team’s one win in your lifetime…Boston fans prob bought lotto tickets after winning so soon after the first time.

The best solution to the heartbreak is to support two teams or in the case of me and the NFL (for a time) both the Packers and the Patriots until I realised Brady was just too good and needed to be shut out at least three times by the Giants 😉

Well if they’re such good toilers why haven’t they won? Granted it obviously isn’t that simple, but unlike the Eagles or Crows or Port they’ve had so long to try to get back there. Is it the fact that not all that many premium players want to play there…or is it because unlike Richmond they didn’t sell out in order to move up into (and then out of) contention.

Are their fans just happy to be in the comp still? One thing separating the AFL with the Nrl is the number of foundation clubs which have survived to today.

Apart from Fitzroy they’re all there in some form or another. But are victories over one’s major rivals enough to justify this continued underachieving. I’d love to come back here in twenty or thirty or forty years time (if still alive as I’m sure the Roar will be around in some virtual reality format) and see how the Warriors have done.

The NRL however is a comp which has over time added a lot more teams more steadily than the AFL which may have put pressure on the earliest clubs.

The North Sydney Bears didn’t win another premiership after the 1920s when the first of MANY expansion clubs were formed.

They may be a good parallel to St Kilda when enough water’s been under the bridge to analyse the signs correctly. But if there’s no pressure on memberships/distric allegiances there’s little you can do…perhaps you accept it or you change allegiances 🙁

Just that there’s so much tearing into/down/up ( 😉 ) into the Wallabies. Sure much of it’s warranted but it all wracks of people who don’t want to let their team get away with any errors as though this is somehow an excuse for NZers to make-fun of you.

What would be much more constructive is to no longer need to anticipate when the NZ Rugby fans are out on the prowl…to instead treat this site like I think it ought to be treated…that is about being the fan of more than one code. My fellow NZers are getting the picture these days, I think…so no need to let them hear about it, just welcome them with open arms 😀

Well actually we’re talking about supposed provinces, which doesn’t mean a thing in Australia. But provinces are ever-changing concepts because they don’t really exist on paper…they’re more spectrums, like Auckland blurs into Counties Manukau which blurs even more into Waikato etc to use a NZ example.

States exist on paper as identities, but this is absolutely no guide as to where to place another team if you want to have more than one per state which is likely where Rugby is going in Australia, thus provinces is a much more helpful concepts, though as a starting point the teams as state teams has a strong history in Australia.

Why do these clubs perenially fail? I mean they have one of the most even competitions to play in, no having to play all the titans twice, no straight knockout and compared to the NRL no distractions of anything approaching the magnitude of State of Origin! Or is it the actual demise of the Australian Football version of the same…can someone please tell me, I just gotta know

Ronald are you one of the dudes who wanted to see Cronulla move to Adelaide? I can’t quite remember your name, but it rings a bell 😉

The Sharks have every chance of being the Washington Nationals of the NRL…consistently making the 8, but in order to do so they need to sew up Carney and their big guns, maybe pulling them from certain games to avoid injuries etc as that will surely be their biggest gamble this year…but whether they even get into the 8 is a few years ago type logic!

But David that’s something of a compliment you just said! 😉 Also not very controversial, what a shame DL could’ve done one with twice as much spruiking 😛

Well actually 20 twenty has gone a long way to engineer fanbases 😉 The BBL so far hasn’t done all that much, just working off the coattails of the IPL/ Champions League or the International game. What you really need is the potential for growth beyond the current (foundation) clubs.

Now obviously originally the NSWRL and the VFL didn’t really look too far into the future and arguably in the case of the VFL were looking almost entirely into the past vs the VFA and their clubs, but they had the potential right then to grow beyond the foundation teams.

I don’t see that with the BBL. I see a lot of fans and smart guys like Sheek (and myself last year at least) who thought Newcastle and other regional centres were the next step…but unlike the A-League with its rectangular fields we don’t have the same tradition (unless you go back far enough) of blockbuster cricket played outside the capital cities.

Now maybe you can re-build a tradition but the real thing holding cricket back is the allegiances to the state level. Rugby has this problem too, where unlike SA and NZ you can’t just create a largely artificial Rugby Union like Buller breaking away from the West Coast for example.

Provinces mean more in South Africa and are harder to just create but compared to states you’ve got incredible liberties in what you can do and most importantly organic rivalries can form and re-form!

You’re selling the game short fadida. If you genuinely want to democratise the code the way to go about is not to allow more people to play the game, but to give more people access to understanding the culture and the idioscyncratic morality involved in playing a given code of football.

There’s something special about the footballs, which seem to require teaching people the right way to do things (grasping the motivation of doing what you’re doing e.g. kicking for the sideline vs kicking for goal), which an expert of any of the football codes would be better at than a basketballer however talented) not merely looking like doing the right thing (fitting in, which many basketballers have shown they are geniuses at)

Another issue is the chance of success. Surely even given the sheer number of College basketballers there’s a very high risk of low-strike rates. By all means try this avenue but also stop thinking inside the box assuming that the novelty factor of the code is the best asset in selling Australian Football.

EDIT: Just read your comment above Redb…I actually think Australian Football has well and truly won the capture the flag battle…your youngsters probably won’t try any other option out there, but you still haven’t won the king of the hill game yet…you’re right!

And on Bob Anderson’s point: actually baseball is still the most culturally relevant sport in the states, and it still wins in terms of over viewership stats which is a non-contest as baseball as a much larger advertising space/reach due to being played in series!

It won’t be genuinely international until there’s another fully professional comp o/s. Having more nationalities play is a noble goal, but being megalomaniacal is not something to be proud of! I think what the code really needs is to encourage more people who would usually not consider Australian Football as an option to have a go.

Americans do fall into this category but then again so do many MANY others closer to home. For example why waste the talent in your backyard: NZ’s got a lot of talent who are already (virtually) conditioned to think Ozzies worth a try in terms of finding employment 😉

It’s quite decent of Sheedy to actually acknowledge what GWS brings to the sporting market in Sydney. Now he might have been under pressure to move away from the Manifest (God’s generously given us this club) Destiny of last year, but decent nonetheless. I’d actually love to know Sheedy’s actual opinion of the GWS rival clubs and codes, anyone have any articles on that?

I actually think it’s crazy that it took this long for there to be 2 Sydney clubs…I mean if you can find space for two Perth teams then surely Sydney having two is crucial. But it’s great we’re here now…

I think the issue stems from the fact that unlike virtually any other code of football or football comp of any football code there is virtually no reason for a club to try to compete if they have no chance of making the finals.

For all the pride Australian Football fans have at their comp for being even and being their sole focus (literally unlike any other football comp in the world) there is nothing in terms of competition structure to prevent this kind of disgrace. It’s actually a wonder only Melbourne FC have been accused of this strategy. There is no reason for players to keep trying their hardest except pride and with a draft system vs free agency that may not be there in many of the club’s players.

There isn’t even an All-Stars contest which could have the potential of giving good quality players something to play for. Now from here to using tanking as a strategy is a massive leap, but it isn’t unprecedented. In world sport teams like Zimbabwe are striving for credibility in Test cricket.

And yet there’s little reason for the players to have heart that things will get better (perhaps much like the economic outlook) and so they start playing-up to their tag as cellar dwellers getting into a vicious circle of self-defeatism and metaphoric (sporting) alcoholism: bingeing in order to forget and forgetting in order to justify bingeing!

I bet Sir Alex Ferguson does know but doesn’t care 😉 The strange thing about other code’s luminaries’ relationship to the AFL is that for all intents and purposes they do what the Melburnians do when in Melbourne! So for all the the whole world laughs at the AFL rhetoric, ultimately those who really count in sporting success are actually diplomatic about it…could teach some of those here a thing or two!

But why do you think a whole lot more people (the Chinese not so much) think Soccer is the best by virtue of the fact that a whole lot more people (the Chinese and Americans not so much) think Soccer is the best sport in the world. I see your point about quality over quantity but unless you’re anti-Capitalist (it’s alright you can speak your mind about that here) the system we all to lesser or greater extent gain from stands for the same thing.

While it’s a big leap it may well be that Soccer is the forerunner of Capitalism itself…that would hold true to Argentina and to a lesser extent the rest of South America which following the arrival of Soccer transitioned from a pseudo-feudalism to liberal-market economies.

Yeah not that likely. But good luck to him. But you can’t honestly use salary as a basis of success. The NFL has insanely big salaries for those who have a skill set niche like an Australian Football player who can punt in the ‘rugby style’ as Americans put it. What is far more important is the intangibles the number of people who watch you play at any one time and the percentage of kids who look up to you.

The Punters in the NFL are the bottom of the hierarchy…generally resented by their team mates and quite possibly the most overpaid players as a good punt is not remotely near the capacity of a RB or P/KR or even the linesman who can actually win games for their team.

OMG not this b.s. argument again. Football is NOT about kicking the ball it is about scoring goals by taking the ball sometimes with the hands and sometimes with the feet into the endzone which every single code of football involves. There is not one exception.

And you know why, that’s because before there was a Melbourne Football Club players at footballe were actually adaptable enough to remember to play a different (technically) game with different rules each time they entered the contest (which in those days meant a high probability of not competing in another one.

But by the same logic Australian Football isn’t really football…which incidentally is the same logic that Soccer fans use to call us all Protestants and therefore heretics which they can marginalise and make it stick for their Eurosnob/Eurozone sycophants ‘sport’ fans any day of the week before lunch time 😉

Why do you think it was added to the FTA regime, RUGBY? It’s almost certainly because it wasn’t perceived as needing a hand-out because theoretically it can pay its way.

But because it now has to I suspect the disparity between the popularity of the FTA codes and Rugby has grown over the time FOX has existed.

Now there are plenty of reasons for this, but one simple one is the fact that it’s in FOX’s interest to not bother to grow the game…whereas advertisers if they could be convinced may well want to be part of the movement 😛