I find it hard to join in on the conversation when people are talking about stuff I know nothing about. A favorite topic of conversation in the office kitchen is football. I always thought I could hold my own in sports talk, but this one? Nah...I don't think I can wing my way through Australian football.
So to at least bring myself to an "acceptable" level of Aussie football knowledge, I made the effort to learn as much as I can about it by watching on TV and reading the sports pages.
To begin with, there are actually THREE football codes being played in Australia.
Rugby League is very popular in New South Wales (NSW) and Queensland (QLD). The dominant professional league is the NRL or National Rugby League. I can only hope to try and explain it in American Football (NFL) terms: It's like a game of running backs (to many Australians, by the way, comparing Rugby league to American football can probably get you in trouble). Forward passes are illegal. Almost all the players have the body of Jerome Bettis(the Bus!). Everyone plays both ways (including kicking!). The game is free flowing and does not have the play stoppages that you have in the NFL between downs.
Another code is Rugby Union. I guess this is the original Rugby code as it is played in more countries around the world. If you saw the movie Invictus (with Matt Damon and Morgan Freeman), the game they played there is Rugby Union. The leagues related to this code that I hear most often in Australia is Super 14 where (and I might be wrong here)teams from South Africa and New Zealand are participating. There are also a lot of organized games between countries such as the Bledisloe Cup (exclusively between Australia and New Zealand). There's another one between Australia and England but the name of this series escapes me at the moment.
What's the major difference between League and Union? In Union, the ball is always "live". Even after a player with the ball is tackled, the opposing team can grab and take possession of the ball. So you will notice that the player seems to be tucking the ball in while passing it on to his mate. A Kiwi friend told me that a Rugby Union game can end in a zero-all tie and teams will still be happy because they played well. I really dig how the players put the ball back in play after it goes out of bounds. Players pick up their teammates (like ballet dancers) to help them grab the throw-in.
The third is Aussie Rules football...if I were to explain it to an American, I would say it's a game of wide receivers and punt kickers. A lot of jumping and drop-kicking the ball. It seems like the scoring is just dependent on kicking goals. It is popular in the states of Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia. To give you an idea, if you were to read a paper in Melbourne, you would be lucky to find a small article about the NRL...in contrast to 8 pages of AFL news!
It's interesting to note that there's only one NRL team in Melbourne (the Storm) and it's one of the best teams in the NRL.
On the other hand, Sydney has one AFL team: the Swans. In a newspaper article that I read last year, the Swans are the most popular team in Sydney...beating NRL teams such as the Parramatta Eels and the Sydney Bulldogs. It helps to have the whole city behind you.
There you go. That's a short overview of the different football codes from the point of view of a newbie.
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