words by Cavan Gallagher

It can be hard as an expat. The money’s different, the weather is like the UK seasons’ evil twin and, worst of all, you have to try and get your head round a new national sport.

Aussie Rules can be a strange sight at first, an almost unintelligible mass of players tearing around the oval, punching the ball more regularly than a Diego Maradonna wet dream, interspersed with regular displays of synchronized jumping. Some of us get used to it and develop a love, or at least an active affection, for the game; some of us don’t. Considering the almost year-round media blitz enjoyed by Pogo Footy, those of us who never warm to it can quickly learn to get sick of the sight of it... and sometimes feel a bit of a pariah when everyone else seems to be having so much fun. Besides, Aussies don’t like having their sport ridiculed – especially by a Brit – and debating soccer is like debating religion in that people already know what they think and will never change their opinion no matter what anyone else says.

But you know what? There’s a strange offshoot tenet of Murphy’s Law that says if you’re told you’re wrong enough times by enough people, there’s a good chance you’ll actually turn out to be right. Copernicus, the Wright brothers, LaToya Jackson... who says us AFL haters can never make the list? Maybe disliking the game is a thing that should be celebrated and not regarded with shame?

So with that in mind, here are a collection of truths we’ve almost known, and should make our manifesto of sporting taste...

It’s NOT the Real Football

Let’s be honest here, soccer is just better. Yes, it’s slow. Yes, goals are few and often don’t happen at all, and yes, sometimes it can make for a dull match if the standard of play isn’t up to scratch. But to just call it boring is to misunderstand the way the sport fundamentally works. It’s the buildup that counts, the tension of two teams struggling against each other before, at long last, one side cracks and that point is earned. As a result, even the most poorly-executed goal means something.

Even a team that concedes in the first five minutes has a potentially soul-destroying test of character ahead of it, because an hour and a half isn’t a long time when you’ve absolutely GOT to score. Likewise, a well-timed goal can change the team that scores it from a bunch of middling hacks to a rampant, adrenalized game-winning machine (an effect which is always thrilling when it’s the weaker team taking the lead). In soccer, every goal is an event and every goal can make or break a match, no matter what the scoreline. Hell, sometimes the refs discount the goals even if they do happen (enter the Offside Rule, a law this writer is convinced was only invented to keep in-studio pundits in work, and to cause arguments in pubs)

Can anyone seriously say they feel the same thing about a game where it’s 75-123 after ten minutes, and the goals are wide enough to fit Oprah Winfrey through? I mean, they even have a couple of little baby goals on either side so you can even score when you miss! If you think AFL’s better, you might as well argue that Tour de France participants should show up with training wheels fitted to their bikes. Those little goals even look like training wheels!

2) It Might Not Even Be the Secondmost Real Football...

Ask New South Wales (though they call rugby football, so they’re already confused enough)

3) The Refs Wear Trenchcoats, for God’s Sake.

WEAR TRENCHCOATS.
FOR GOD’S.
SAKE.

4) Piking On Your Own Party

Aussie Rules is meant to be the national sport, yet two states (Tasmania – though they’re working on it – and the NT) don’t even have teams. If that didn’t seem odd enough, these states even let some of the other states’ teams play in their stadiums, which smacks not only of general slackness but is disturbingly reminiscent of an unpopular kid who lets the cool kids at school use his parents’ house for a party so that they might feel some of that coolness seep into them by some kind of hyper-needy osmosis. If only it ever worked...

5) What’s in a Name?

Nothing that indicates what country it’s from, apparently, as the gradual change from the name ‘Australian Football’ to AFL was made not just to push the league’s ‘brand’ (just typing that makes me want to crawl into the shower with the roughest block of carbolic soap I can find), but apparently to remove from the name any connotations of Australia. Hang on, isn’t this the country that can’t pick its nose without making it a statement of national pride? And what’s the harm in putting ‘Australia’ in the name, seeing as it’s the only country that plays it professionally?

But then again, ‘AFL’ does sound very American – and if there’s one thing this sport does do brilliantly, it’s Americanizing its names (as we’re about to see)...

6) What’s in a Name 2: What’s in a Name Harder!

I’m not sure why a country founded by the Brits and mainly comprised of people descended from Europeans and Asians decided to use the American method for team-naming, but you’d have thought that somebody would’ve had the decency to talk them out of it.

Said method revolves around two faithful hallmarks; animals and cloying tweeness. I mean, come on: ‘Port Power’? That’s just fruity. If you’re going to invoke your town’s nautical history into your name, at least try and avoid one that sounds like a bad Saturday morning kids’ show about metrosexual tweens who transform into robots that would get laughed out of Jeffrey Dahmer’s costume party. And Fremantle almost pull the same trick off by simply calling themselves the Dockers, but ruin it all by having a logo that looks like the Chesty Bond guy appearing in one of those cheap, incomprehensible Scandinavian cartoons shown before ‘Metrosexual ‘Port’ Power Rangers’ (come to think of it, maybe those Scandinavian animators designed the teams’ colour schemes as well, because seeing the lot of the AFL logos in one place quite frankly looks like the floor of a bulimic texta eaters’ Christmas party at ‘Purge o’ clock’).

Geelong Cats? Please, don’t get too specific on us; what, did you see that Richmond had already baggsied ‘Tigers’ and Brisbane had ‘Lions’ and just gave up? Extra points to North Melbourne, who at least chose to name themselves after a native animal.

Seriously, these names are so tediously Americanized they can’t even show any originality in picking their animals. They’re living in a country stuffed end to end with pant-moisteningly lethal animals (a few picks: crocodiles, razorbacks, approximately eight million species of spider that can kill a man just by sneezing) and these boneheads call themselves Cats and Swans and actually think they sound tough?

And as far as Collingwood goes...look, I’m a Newcastle United supporter who speaks for the people of Tyneside when I say that we feel no pride in our colours and nickname being used for anything connected with Eddie McGuire. And if you run into us, please don’t bring this up – aren’t we suffering enough already?

7) And speaking of Eddie McGuire…

The Footy Show. Now, sportsmen all over the world can be known to act like irresponsible, drunken idiots on their downtime; other countries, however, don’t put them in a TV studio while they’re doing it. The fact that the media can wag their collective fingers at Ben Cousins (more on him in a sec) and STILL put this execrable dreck on the air is possibly the biggest show of hypocrisy since... well, pick anything John Lydon’s done in the last ten years or so.

And don’t get me started on Sam Newman. I honestly don’t know who irritates me more, the man himself or the people who go on about him as if he’s the Antichrist in a lapel mike. When you actually look into some of his most notorious escapades, it’s not hard to frankly, be pretty underwhelmed. Wikipedia lists such harrowing crimes against humanity as: ‘Referring to James Brayshaw as dressing like a “girl”... Chasing Shane Crawford with clear violent intent after Crawford appeared to draw on an Archibald Prize-entered portrait of Newman... Undergoing a ‘nappy change’ by Shane Crawford and Brendan Fevola, when Shane was disgruntled about comments Sam made about him not being a good father. He ended up being covered in talcum powder and his underwear was doused with water... Colouring in Craig Hutchison’s bald head with a black marker, then the following week rubbing black boot polish on his head.’

Sure, I could go into the rampant misogyny of the man, or his apparent love of belittling people in public (especially immigrants), but by the time I’d done researching him I couldn’t help wondering if people give the guy too much credit by focusing on these accusations.

To be a racist/sexist/misanthrope at least suggests enough depth to have an agenda; the incidents above, however, sound more like ‘Bash Street Kids: the Meals On Wheels Years’, and when it comes to debating these acts he makes Plug look like Noam Chomsky. If Newman has any kind of higher thinking going on in that Cro-Magnon distended testicle he calls a head, it’s solely to do with the knowledge of why people have granted him a career with all this attention and how to keep it coming. Of course, now that I’ve contributed to that attention by wasting two paragraphs on the guy, I can now enjoy a wave of self-loathing that may lead me to end my existence by sucking on a tail pipe. That is, if I can find one Newman hasn’t already stuffed a banana in.

8) Richmond Tigers Hate This Writer

Why? Because they seem to have decided that even though I moved to the other side of the country, I still couldn’t do without not being able to move without hearing about Ben bloody Cousins! You can talk all you want about the pressures of being a sports star and the influences young athletes are subjected to, and to a large extent you’d be right.

But that doesn’t stop our Ben from being the latest in a long line of athletes who by intentionally messing with their bodies, i.e. the one and only reason they have a career at all, show the kind of form that won’t win them any awards that don’t have the word ‘Darwin’ in their name.

9) Who Likes Short Shorts?

The outfits are a little ironic considering the sport is surrounded by a culture of homophobia that has seen not one player come out as gay in its 150 year history. In fact, it has taken the AFL until December 2008 to even start talking about establishing anti-homophobia legislation in the sport, and even that has come after years of pressure from special interest groups and even the Australian Sports Commission threatening to pull its funding.

And this is a sport that revolves around fit young men in hot pants jumping on each other... please clear the area, for this is the point where the Irony Train derails.

10) Piss_Poor.com

If you’re reading this article, there’s a fair chance that you’d never be inclined to look at the AFL’s official site because you’d never have any plausible reason for wanting to. Allow me to disabuse you of any notions you might have that you’re missing anything, unless you’re a fan of nauseating corporate kow-towing.

The first thing you wonder when you hit the site is whether you’ve accidently clicked on Telstra Bigpond for, not only is it inundated with ads you will see a heading banner exactly the same as that on Bigpond.com, section links and all, effectively making it look like you’ve gone to the wrong site).

Cringeworthy enough? It doesn’t even end there; you can’t even watch any of its embedded video unless you have Bigpond broadband. Is the AFL owned by Telstra? No. Is Telstra a corporate partner of theirs? No. Are the AFL idiots who’d rather sell ownership of their site to someone else rather than do it themselves? Yes.

In this day and age, an organization’s website is the lynchpin of their public identity. The fact that the AFL have basically let theirs look like the someone else’s site entirely just goes to show that their general half-arsedness truly knows no bounds.

And if you don’t believe me, just ask Senior Vice-President for New Media for Major League Baseball (and owner of an acronym people have died pronouncing) Justin Shaffer, who was actually flown over by the AFL so he could tell them how lame it is. Given the team names and general tone of the sport’s marketing, it seems fitting that they have to look to America to even tell them the mind-shrivellingly obvious.

11) The Hot Pants

Yes, I know I just mentioned this (and that this is meant to be ten reasons) but by god, it deserves to be said twice.

So there you have it: you do have good reasons to dislike AFL.

Be strong, be vigilant but, most importantly be proud!