American sport. Loud, high-scoring and subtle as Wendell Sailor’s personality.
Americans enjoy home-grown sports like football that involves little kicking, a national league called the World Series and basketball, the game that lasted years before someone thought to put a hole in the basket.
Here in Australia, we do things a little differently. We prefer sports that are usually far removed from the brash nature of the US.
I’ve decided to analyse each major sport in Australia that the Yanks haven’t fully adopted. I will give each one a rating out of five hot dogs to decide how much it appeals to the American sports ideology.
Rugby league
This is a tricky one. League can either be extremely entertaining and feature huge amounts of points, but it can also deteriorate to a dire spectacle which features little tries or entertainment.
Though league is a relatively simple game, the structured play and waiting times for points do not work in its favour.
2 out of 5 Hot Dogs
Rugby union
No, no and no. The complicated nature of rugby ensures that it in no way does it appeal to the American sports blueprint. Highly technical penalties, frequent stoppages and sometimes try-less contests mean that rugby is as American as communism.
1 out of 5 Hot Dogs
Australian rules football
Aussie Rules is closer to heading in the right direction than both rugby codes. With lots of points guaranteed in each game, as well as spectacular marks and decent amounts of contact, there is potential for American likeability.
However, the ‘complicatedness’ of passing (“Why can’t you just throw it?”) and the fact that you can score behinds as well as goals makes Aussie Rules a little too complex to realistically become adopted by the Land of the Free.
3 out of 5 Hot Dogs
Cricket
In the form of four/five-day games, cricket hasn’t got a chance of being liked by Americans. No game that can take five days of continuous play without getting a result has.
A sport like cricket, which can see a contest develop and swing between two sides through several hours of carefully-played strategy, is extremely slow-going for the mindset of Americans.
One-dayers aren’t much better, but Twenty20s are a step in the right direction.
By the very way that it is designed, T20 cricket features more big hits, more action and more flames/music/awesome explosions than Tests and one-dayers.
However, all forms of cricket have the same drawback – their rules. Cricket is a complex game which makes little sense without knowing most rules.
The process of scoring requires two players to simultaneously run towards lines opposite of each other, which is far too complicated. Cricket has no hope of appealing to Americans.
Tests and One-dayers: ½ out of 5 Hot Dogs
Twenty20s: 2½ out of 5 Hot Dogs
We are very different from Americans, and there is no better way to show this than through the differences in our sports.
If there is one message you take out of this article, let it be that we are right and the Yanks are wrong.
Of course, who cares what Americans think, right?
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