The Footy

A few weeks back, we had the chance to watch the footy—live. For those of you who don’t know, footy is Australian Rules Football, and looks like a combination of many sports, including hockey, basketball, soccer, volleyball, football, rugby, and ultimate Frisbee.

There are 18 players per side, four goal posts, and no pads. You start the game with a ball up, which is essentially a jump ball. Then, if your team has the ball, you can either kick or hand ball (sort of like an underhand volleyball serve) the footy to another player on your team, or you can run and occasionally bounce (dribble) the ball down the field while you’re looking for someone to pass to, either via a kick or hand ball. The other team tries to tackle the player with the ball, or catch the ball in the air. If a player catches a kick that goes more than 15 m, then they get a free kick from where they caught it, meaning that no one can tackle them. The point of the game is to kick the ball through the middle two posts, which scores as a 6 point goal. If the ball instead goes through the first and second posts or third and fourth posts, then the team gets one point.

The game is much faster paced than American football, or gridiron, as they refer to it here. The players are very fit, as they have to be able to run, tackle and kick all the time. And, they wear very short shorts. The umpires have to be just as fit as the players (though certainly not as muscular). In fact, I’ve never seen umpires take their job so seriously as in footy. They sprint all over the field, even after a goal is scored. They practice their boundary throw-in technique while the teams are warming up before the game starts. They do bounce downs and ball ups and blow their whistles all the time. Interestingly, play doesn’t stop when they blow the whistle, which also seems to be the case in netball. I have to admit that it was a bit confusing for me at first, since I’m used to a whistle meaning stop play in sports.

Our team, the Adelaide Crows, played very poorly and lost to the Sydney Swans. Unfortunately, their season has continued to go badly, and they just finally won their first game against Richmond, the only other team that hadn’t yet won a game. That means the Crows narrowly avoided winning the Wooden Spoon. I’m not entirely clear about this award, but I think it goes to the worst team, and is definitely handed out in more sports than just footy. Anyways, on the front page of the paper the day the Crows played Richmond, there was a picture of a little girl in a Crows uniform crying and holding an enormous wooden spoon.

A few things surprised me a little bit about the game. First, Adelaide has organized for there to be free Footy Shuttles to the game from suburbs all over Adelaide. They also take people home. I think this is a wonderful idea—the oval is not really in a convenient location, and it seems to make so much sense to reduce the amount of traffic by encouraging the people to ride free buses. We rode one home, and it was great apart from the three drunk guys sitting just ahead of us. I think people like that should just be kicked off the bus and have to find their own way home. I suppose that’s the down side of free transportation—people know they have a designated driver, so feel like they can behave irresponsibly. However, given the choice, I would still opt for drunk guys on free shuttles than heaps of cars creating loads of traffic.

A second interesting thing I noticed was that there were several groups of women who had come to the game together, without any men. It was neat, because as we were walking out after the game, I heard at least two different groups of women analyzing the game. That probably happens in the US as well, but it definitely is not a common thing, and I thought it was pretty neat to see. As we’ve come to realize, footy is a huge thing here, and is a major source of community for lots of towns. Almost every little town has an oval, and people come out to watch the footy at their local ovals every weekend. People work hard to fundraise to support the footy clubs with things like lights for night games, and better facilities. Pretty cool.

The history of the game is fairly interesting, and you can read more on Wikipedia, if you're interested. It started in Melbourne, and was even known as Victorian rules football for quite awhile. New South Wales and Queensland resisted the game for a long time, playing rugby instead. But, now there are footy teams everywhere, and it’s really gaining strength throughout the country. Aussies really love the footy.

Dave and I managed to catch the very end of the Tiwi Islands Footy premiership on TV. The Tiwi Islands are part of the Northern Territory and are north of Darwin. We were watching as they were doing the awards. The team that lost was nowhere to be seen. The guy announcing said that they had left the stadium and returned to their boats to start the journey back to their island. What a way to travel to a footy premiership!

The Tiwi Island Premiership is a fairly substantial tourist attraction for the Aussies. Here are some fascinating facts that I just learned about the Tiwi Islands Football League from the Wikipedia article:

- The Tiwi Australian Football League has 900 participants out of a community of about 2600, the highest football participation rate in Australia (35%).

- Many of the players have a preference for participating barefoot.

Pretty awesome. From the sounds of it, a lot of the Tiwi Island footballers are pretty good players, but very few of them play in the AFL (Australian Football League). It would probably be an interesting research project to learn about how the Islanders came to adopt footy, and to compare the footy league there with the footy league on the mainland. Anyways, I'm not sure I'll ever really catch the footy fever, but it is entertaining, and I definitely like the uniforms : )