- Video
-
Club Roar
Captured a great grassroots sporting moment? We want to see it!Content Collections
The Roar Community
- Join
- Login
Some time ago, two New South Welshmen responded to the call to develop a game of football different from that played at Rugby school and Cambridge University.
Football clubs were established and they formed football leagues. Newspapers reported these contests under the headline of ‘Football’. This new brand of football was so popular that it quickly spread to neighbouring colonies.
Britain sent teams down under to play the colonies at football, alternating between rugby rules and colonial rules. Then the war began.
Rugby stalwarts were worried. This colonial game was very popular and some rugby clubs, like the Waratah club in Sydney and the Fremantle club in Perth, had switched to the more entertaining brand of football.
Rugby tried changing some of its rules to be more competitive but in the end it had to resort to more forceful methods to contain the new game emanating from the new Federation of Australia.
They succeeded in stifling the Australian game on the east coast, but not the new breakaway rugby league, which, with its professionalism and more entertaining game than its parent, soon overtook rugby union.
World Wars came and went. Immigration after the second World War led to the next sporting conflict – the desire for the immigrant’s sporting allegiance.
Australian football had partial success – it remained the dominant code in its heartlands in all respects, while football became the dominant participation sport in NSW, despite the high profile of rugby league.
Television and colour TV became common. The dominant codes leveraged their positions to become even more dominant and everybody has happy with their own little competitions, until a complicated series of events led to South Melbourne FC relocating to Sydney.
This led to a much larger series of events – ultimately the formation of the AFL, the NRL and the nationalisation of the Australian sporting landscape. Intensity soared and every code formed a national competition fighting for market share.
The dust settled, the contact sports claimed the winter months and the rest were relegated to the summer months. The AFL had ‘expanded’ to Sydney and Brisbane while the NRL had ‘consolidated’ the east coast, which later included Melbourne and New Zealand.
We were just getting used to this equilibrium when the AFL announced that there would new AFL teams in the Gold Coast and Western Sydney.
The NRL saw this as expansion and declared war (even though, technically, the AFL was already in Sydney with the presence of the Sydney Swans).
Forget the perennial fight league had with union, forget that football is easily the dominant participation code in Sydney, this was war – real war.
The publicity surrounding the new Western Sydney AFL team certainly has helped the Giants and has actually exposed the NRL’s lack of diligence to a degree.
In the meantime, the real opposition to the contact codes in Western Sydney kicked off this summer. Did anybody notice?
Who’s in your ultimate team? Pick the best team and compete with other fans for daily prizes on Draftstars. For the best odds on the game try out Aussie bookmaker PlayUp. Think. Is this a bet you really want to place? Set a deposit limit.