Never heard Serie A called that before.
Never heard Serie A called that before.
I think Victorian Rules would be ok if:
Some very good points. The carefully-curated, marketing-first nature of how the AFL is run is incredibly vomit-inducing. Additionally, no state outside of Victoria needs to know about the AFL, yet it is rammed down our throats in the media well and above an actual universal sport like football.
I also increasingly get the feeling these days that non-Melbourne teams exist to give the impression it is a national sport, but in reality, the powers that be really seem to push every avenue to ensure a Melbourne team wins the competition. I’ve heard too many things from AFL to feel otherwise about it, as an outsider occasionally looking in. It really reinforces the feeling of careful curation and of fakeness at the professional level of AFL.
You can tell a lot of you have only lived in Sydney.
As soon as you get into south and west Australia it’s all about AFL
This.
WA is almost entirely AFL supporters be it 2 WA teams or people who supported VFL teams before they existed, with football and rugby largely continuing to exist due to immigration from Ireland and UK, NZ and South Africa and league being followed almost entirely by QLD or NSW transplants.
Timely reminder that most people are fucking idiots and therefore popularity =/= quality. In the same way that Bieber sells records, Two And A Half Men had high ratings and Trump made the White House.
I’ve come around to embracing the suck, because it’s the truly shit things in the world that enable the beautiful to elevate and shine above. If every sport was good to watch or every record a masterpiece then everything would just be beige.
Eddie alluded to it but there is a ‘bizarro’ w@gball energy on this thread, that does not exist in any other non-football related thread on SFCU, and in my opinion if AFL had the same trajectory as say basketball in this country then that energy would not exist.
Again, nobody is saying you have to like the game but nobody is going into the NFL thread to hang shit on the skillset of the players like they do in here. Ultimately, I think the vibe stems from jealousy of the three things they have which we want… money, power and influence at a national level.
I get that there’s historical animosity and tension between the codes. Totally fair. Atleast make peace with that before making claims on players skills or the game itself, OR don’t make comment at all. It’s exactly what football/soccer haters do to us. It’s like my dad is tougher than your dad territory.
Dont attribute to jealousy what can more justifiably be attributed to anger and resentment for the sport that has most consistently tried to keep football down mate.
League & Union don’t seem to have the same level of contempt for football that AFL does - at an institutional level.
Read the thread title, and you should be able to understand pretty quickly why the difference exists in this thread.
If we were to go into a proper AFL thread and chat like this, yeah it would probably be out of order.
Think about this for a moment. The AFL is the highest level of Aussie Rules on planet earth.
The AFL has regularly tried to import players from other sports with no AFL experience .
Could you imagine ANY other sport trying that? Test cricket, EPL/La Liga, NBA, Olympic sports. No, it would be completely absurd. It also goes to show the low skill level required to play the game. The fact that AFL think that sportsmen with ZERO experience can adapt to AFL (the highest standard of Aussie Rules on planet earth) is also a tacit admission of the low skill level required to play the game.
The only comparable example is AFL players playing as punters in the NFL (a specialist kicking position) and the occasional NRL player in the NFL, noting that NRL & NFL share many comparable skillsets. However even a supremely talented NRL player like Jarryd Hayne struggled to adapt and was cut.
I have no doubt that any tall, strong professional football player, given some time to work on upper body strength and handball skills, could walk into any AFL team and fucking dominate.
The old forum had two threads for this very reason. One was the we follow AFL thread and the other was we hate AFL thread. For some reason only the latter made it over here.
Supply and demand in full effect.
For over a hundred years.
Victorian Rules centric media actively disparaging soccer. Victorian Rules admins actively conspiring against football and publicly celebrating football’s failures.
I spent a summer running around the eastern suburbs trying to find a field for Loko Cove’s Premier League team. AFL was block booking fields for endless periods of time and not using or under using the fields whilst there wasn’t enough pitches for soccer teams.
They’re selfish cunts who act as a cartel. No other sport behaves like them.
Very, very much this.
I don’t necessarily hate AFL because of the sport itself. It has the potential to be entertaining. But then again, in the same manner that throwing a hot chip at a flock of seagulls is mildly entertaining, or a toddler chasing after a group of pigeons before faceplanting with the grace of a boulder is entertaining.
I’d watch a game of AFL over say an episode of the Kardashians, Love Island, (insert shitty reality Television program here), but I’m not watching it because I’m overly invested in the sport or the teams.
The only time I’ve enjoyed watching a game of AFL was a few years ago when my mate who lives in Melbourne took me to the MCG to watch a game. I think it was Carlton v St Kilda (could be wrong). I was only interested in attending said spectacle as I’d never been to the MCG before (except for a stadium tour when I was 18), and my mate told me watching it live from the MCG is much better than watching on TV. That, I’ll give him. But I still found myself bored by the third quarter, before spending most of the fourth quarter people watching.
As a football fan, I despise the AFL as an institution. Their open contempt for football in this country, and all the well-known issues between the two codes aside, just their arrogance in thinking that AFL as a sport is some elite sporting spectacle, watched by the gods, and the players are divine heroes. That’s not to say football, Rugby League and any other sports has that energy - football certainly does especially in the European leagues, but it’s this swagger, arrogance, and blatant refusal to accept that they’re only popular in Australia, and only limited to a few states.
You know the shit the world puts on Americans when they travel abroad? Well think of that example, AFL is the arrogant, narcistic American traveller whose going to put down, and insult everything because it’s not American, or it’s foreign, or just because they feel entitled.
I also despise the AFL for some of their terminology which I find to be triggering.
So many posters who somehow missed that this thread is actually meant for unabashedly bashing Aussie Rules/AFL/footy…
As for skill required to play the sport at a high level, yeah the fact that AFL can poach players from other codes and make them practice for a year then debut in the AFL speaks volumes.
Never in a million years would an AFL player be able to practice football for a year and start in the EPL, La Liga or Bundesliga. If you didn’t start developing football skills by playing club football by age 7-8, you will rarely make it at a high level in football.
I mean who are the AFL players that I can watch highlight reels of their sublime skill, in the same way I can watch jaw-dropping skill of footballers like Messi, C. Ronaldo, R9, Zidane, Ronaldinho, Maradona or Pele? I stand by the argument that the skills required for Aussie Rules are generic.
But at the same time if I grew up immersed in it I’d probably be a one eyed AFL footy fan right now. The rivalries and narratives alone would be enough to make it interesting. Same if I grew up immersed in NFL or US college football.
Seems like a good time to post this…
Apparently this term originated at the SCG during a cricket match. The soldiers posted at Randwick Barracks used to make their way down to the ground and offer their support to the Aussies and “advice” to the opposition.
They were labelled the “barrackers” by the Members.
See now that’s a cool story. I love stuff like this
I don’t mind barracking.
You’re gonna need a hell of a compelling story to win me over on cheer squads though eddie
I like that the Victorians use a word originating in their most hated place to describe the thing they do to support their beloved teams.