During the world cup, every other sport is just camping out.

Welcome to the forum.

I love visiting Melbourne but the strangle hold that the AFL has on the media and Government down there makes me glad I don't live there.I would imagine the same goes for WA,SA and Tassie as far as the media and Government support goes.

Of course NRL gets a lot of attention up here but it is not as suffocating or as pervasive as in the southern and western states.

They really are a bunch of insular cunce.

https://www.news.com.au/sport/afl/afl-draw-widespread-backlash-after-releasing-fixture-during-socceroos-game/news-story/edd518a5502f38ea42fbb14ef7223d19

They really tried this today. Smell the fear.

I absolutely agree with you. The development of soccer during quarantine and the weakening of quarantine is very striking. I recently started writing essays on how the pandemic has affected the world in general and sport in particular. I found very interesting examples of essays on this subject on the website https://writingbros.com/essay-examples/sports/ They are not yet related to the current situation, but you can find in them the prerequisites for the events that are currently taking place.

I’d rather we focus on street small sided pitches like they have in the UK all in our urban areas.
unfortunately in the world we live in, the public liability is too much is little Johnny falls over and grazes his knee.

So many golf courses in this country, I think we could get rid of half and convert into all weather football pitches 

Better than stealing the fields currently allocated to football by local councils.

“NSW -AFL clubs to play footy on fairways as golf clubs struggle

Golfers and Aussie rules footballers may soon be sharing the courses as the city’s battle for public space heats up. “

https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/afl-clubs-to-play-footy-on-fairways-as-golf-clubs-struggle/news-story/e86d6ab9d607fb8cf09f33d37dbd91ad

All non-Victorian teams should pull out of the AFL, and let the Melbourne egg ball wankers have it for themselves.

Yes, judging by the standings, things are really not very good https://777score.co.uk/ . I can say that the game at the moment in the performance of this team leaves much to be desired. Maybe something will change at the last moment but in miracles, too, do not believe.

A lot of letters. But even without a full reading it is clear that things are not the best way.

Chris
7 hours ago
Who in their right mind would want to travel to Perth and play in front of a feral and for the best part football ignorant crowd ? Chardonnay sippers from north of the river who understand soccer better than Aussie Rules . Crowd frees and weak umpires compound it . The VFL brings back many pleasant memories , this current league is easy to walk away from

a report from the Herald Sun's " staff reporter "
so effectively , no one wants to put their name to this Walkely nomination... and it's sponsored content by the AFL....

That is a great read. The basis for a film script right there 😂 and yes, it was eight-bloody-one though. 

This always makes me smile considering what a carnt he has been to our game. 

It was 8-1, eight bloody one .And Barnstoneworth United were the team thrashed.

The AFL boganatti types have confused culture with sport . AFL has always been  a subliminal outlet for entrenched  strayan xenophobia  and a metaphor for white nationalist superiority aka  'real aussies' and 'real aussie kultcha ' etc as an expression of white aussie supremacy 
'Culture by its nature is non-competive ..yet all the endless hyperbole by the AFL's media sycophants and cheersquad  ..'our great game' our great aussie game etc
is an endless  pr campaign to prove beyond 'the aussie game' and the 'real aussies ' that play it is inherently superior to 'THAT efnic game played by THEM.'

While reality is AFL has the international cred of left-handed junior mini lacrosse to the AFL types it only needs a few  words from a 'sample' of foreign folk to say nothing more than 'umm..yeh we heard about this AFL thing' to  legitimise their delusions of global importance of 'our great game' .
AFL from aminute pool of just 24million inits delusion of superiority doesnt need to compete  against other nations ...which is .morethan happy to  play withitself  and give itself 8 page liftouts on its 'australian all stars' . When your a 'cultural icon' ..who needs competition ..the very essence of  sport.

Barassi tripped, fell, limped off. He was about to embark on his bombshell transfer from Melbourne to become playing coach of Carlton, where he began to make his legendary coaching name, but did not again touch the heights as a player. 

Correction to this: Barassi did not limp off the field he was carried off an a stretcher!!!!

All this AFL talk made me remember an article I found while researching a book I found the other day

https://www.theage.com.au/sport/soccer/the-game-that-never-happened-20091014-ge856i.html

'EIGHT-NIL,'' croaks an exasperated everyfan played by Michael Palin in Ripping Yarns. ''Eight-bloody-nil.'' So was that scoreline immortalised. But another 8-0 result, this one for real, has been so lost to memory that when it was exhumed from its unmarked grave this year by academic, author and soccer aficionado Ian Syson, he dubbed it ''the game that never happened''.

But assuredly, it did. It was 45 years ago, on a sunny Saturday afternoon at Olympic Park. Twenty-five thousand people witnessed it, raising the then princely sum of £2600 for charity. It was between Slavia, the Dockerty Cup champion, and a team of VFL superstars, including Ron Barassi, Ted Whitten, Kevin Murray, Des Tuddenham and Gordon Collis, the newly invested Brownlow medallist. ''Was it really 8-0?'' asked Collis yesterday. ''Oh, dear.''

It began when Jack Dyer, the infamous Captain Blood, went to the Dockerty Cup final as a guest of the Victorian Soccer Federation, but - the ingrate - wrote in ''Dyer 'ere'', his calculatedly shrill Truth column: ''I went, I saw, and I was sickened. It really is a girls' game - but only for big girls.'' It is the debate that never ends, merely changes forums.

Hammy McMeechan, newly arrived from Scotland to play for Slavia, later Melbourne Croatia and the Socceroos, read Dyer's column. ''I had to,'' he said. ''When I first came out, I couldn't believe it; even the women talked football back home, the women didn't care about soccer. They went shopping. But if you want to talk to people here, you have to be interested in football.''

On World of Sport, McMeecham's clubmate, Dave Meecham, issued a challenge. It was accepted. The Sporting Globe was ecstatic. ''We've been waiting for years for this, and it's here at last,'' it said. ''Soccer v footy. Captain Blood has already warned Slavia that it's going to be 'on', and this means one thing - it's going to be the roughest, toughest soccer match Victoria has ever seen.''

The enmity was partly hyperbolic. In preparation, the teams trained together, convivially. ''They were good guys. We had a laugh with them,'' said McMeechan.

''I was very taken with Kevin Murray: lovely guy. Paul Vinar [132 games for Geelong], he was quite good. Stuey Magee [216 games for Footscray and South Melbourne], he wasn't bad.

''Compared to the rest of them, he was quite good. He'd no' have got a game with us, though.''

In the city insurance office where he worked as a clerk, McMeechan's workmates noted in the paper that he was up against Collis. ''You won't get a kick,'' they said. ''He's the Brownlow medallist.'' Retorted McMeechan: ''It's no' Aussie rules we're playing, it's soccer.''

Marching girls, a beauty contest and footraces set the festive scene. Some remember the contest as rugged. ''Not in the least,'' said McMeechan. ''They were trying to clatter in with their tackles, but they didn't know how to tackle.'' Collis, mildly but confessionally, begs to differ. ''It was a little spiteful in that we, with our technique [laughing], couldn't resist the opportunity of a hip and shoulder here and there,'' he said.

''The other boys had tricks of their own. One of them was to put a foot over the ball as you were about to kick it, so your shins would make contact with the soles of their boots. That didn't improve relations. We didn't see it as very manly way of going about things. But it was effective. It was also effective in stirring us up!''

It also led to what retrospectively might be seen as the game's most telling happening. Barassi launched at a Slavia player called John Auchie. ''If you know soccer,'' said McMeechan, ''if you go in and kick the ball and I put my foot behind it, it's like kicking a wall. That's all he did.''

Barassi tripped, fell, limped off. He was about to embark on his bombshell transfer from Melbourne to become playing coach of Carlton, where he began to make his legendary coaching name, but did not again touch the heights as a player. Years later, when they crossed paths again in a King Street newsagency, Barassi told McMeechan that the injury he sustained that day eventually forced him to give football away.

Elsetimes, McMeechan ran on to a through ball, but with Collis bearing down on him quickly and deftly backheeled it to a teammate. On a whim, he kept sprinting, towards the corner flag. ''He [Collis] kept chasing me,'' he said. ''The more he kept chasing me, the more I kept running. I don't think he realised I didn't have the ball.''

At the flag, he turned to face Collis, making a gesture as if to ask: ''What will you do now?'' The crowd laughed roisterously. ''You should have seen the look he gave me,'' said McMeechan, adding ruefully: ''I should never have done it.'' Collis, coyly, said he could not remember it.

At half-time, it was 3-0. Chastened, the VFL team asked if they might play Australian rules in the second half. Slavia coach Brian Birch, a Busby babe, demurred. ''Look at my players,'' he said. ''Hammy's the biggest, and he's 5'6'' [167 centimetres]. We could never beat you at your game.''

So, honourably, they played it out, until it was eight-bloody-nil (in merely two, 25-minute halves, too). ''We had reasonable control of the ball during the game, but we didn't have much idea of how to score,'' said Collis. ''It was a reality check as far as the difficulty of scoring was concerned. That's pretty obvious to everyone when you see a match finish at 0-0. We weren't the only ones who had difficulty scoring.'' It is the aspect of soccer he dislikes still.

McMeechan admired the VFL team for its sporting attitude. ''They must have realised after two or three training sessions that they couldn't play soccer,'' he said. ''Fair goes to them: I don't think I would have liked to try and play their game, not in front of all those people, and make a fool of myself. That was a big thing for them to do.''

Between these co-existing codes, there is never quite war, never quite detente. Warlords on both sides continue to rattle their sabres, but once in a while, a little mutual enlightenment prevails. Looking back at Olympic Park, Syson concludes: ''The most important lesson is that for too long, many Australians failed utterly to understand the technical skill and artistry of the world game, and the physical qualities needed to play even at a moderate semi-professional level.''

McMeechan framed it another way. Slavia played that day with an orthodox soccer structure, he said. The VFL team was ''a goalkeeper, and 10 ruck-rovers''. The result: eight-bloody-nil.

The years have passed. Too many who played that day are dead. The football landscape has changed: it is more cluttered, but also more vibrant. ''Fifteen years ago, I said Australia would beat Scotland,'' said McMeechan. ''Some of the boys laughed at me, but they've since proven it.'' In the effort to popularise the game, McMeechan said televised European soccer had made all the difference: it had allowed the indifferent and the hostile to see what the fuss was all about.

Collis finds soccer seeping into his consciousness. ''With Australia starting to exert some influence in the world, that's interesting,'' he said. ''And I've held the view for a long time that soccer is poised to take some bigger strides from a participation aspect. I can see that it's a very mother-friendly sort of game.'' From ''a girls' game'' to ''mother friendly''; so might soccer's changing status be charted.

Collis adds more. ''With the way our game is played these days, I can see it falling into soccer's hands. Fellows going head-first into packs: it's difficult to look at, and I think dangerous. I can see a time coming when there's a serious head or neck injury that may make people think again. But players are just expected to do that these days. There's a lot I don't like about our game at the moment.''

''The game that never happened'' won't ever happen again: professional stringencies preclude it. But thanks to Syson, it has happened this year, and in soccer's inimitable way, prolifically: on a soccer website (Das Libero), an AFL website (Footy Almanack), in Victoria University Bulletin of Sport and Culture, and in the Greek newspaper Neos Kosmos.

''What do you want with Neos Kosmos?'' McMeechan's puzzled newsagent asked him. He could have replied: ''To make sure it happened.''

Obvious puff-piece. Hun trying to convince readers its not an irrelevant sport internationally.

So I'm working on the basketball world cup in Shanghai, I just asked some of the Chinese people I'm working with if they knew of AFL and that they played one game per season in their city, not one had any clue, and these are English speaking young professional people who work on international sporting events lol

What Chinese visitors to Melbourne really think of AFL
Staff writer, Herald Sun
an hour ago
With teams now playing for premiership points in Shanghai, the AFL is pushing footy hard into China.

But what do Chinese students and visitors to Melbourne really think of our game?

Monash University Master of Journalism students Joyce Fung and Minyue Ding took to the streets of Melbourne to find out, asking students and visitors what they thought of the AFL (Watch the video below).

“This video is about how the Chinese community in Australia think of footy when AFL is promoting the games in China,” Ms Fung said.

“We want to explore their understanding of the game, the promotion in China, and address the stereotypical view that Chinese people can’t play footy.”




Ms Ding said footy encapsulated the spirit of Australia but many Chinese found it to be “strange”.

“But we found more and more Chinese start to know it and get interested in it.,” she said.

“This video shows that footy has no limitations for any community or anyone.”

i think he still doesn't get the meaning of cultural cringe.

it means that we don't rate ourselves and always look abroad for the proper standard.  That's precisely what we do with football and probably the opposite of what they do in the afl.

If you re-read what I said you will see I said “in some  areas “.  

Do we really suffer from thinking Aussie is always better?

I would have thought for the most part, we are not like that at all, maybe it's easy to find examples of both extremes

:D .....I'll pay that ...

onepersonslowhandclapinacrowdedroom.gif

Their flag is a big plus.