What's more Australian - AFL or NRL?

[RodgerFox]

Dear All,

I'm doing an assignment as part of my final semester of university on sport, culture and society. I've decided to do my final essay on "What is more Australian? AFL or NRL?"

Any comments, suggestions, opinions are welcomed and appriciated.

Cheers,

BB82

Based on the events of Saturday night, I'm not sure I know what 'Australian' is anymore.

 

[Deej]

i thought this was about which game was more australian - aussie rules or rugby league.

Aussie rules is purely an australian game, Rugby (both codes) is an english game that is played by australians. just like cricket soccer darts caber-tossing and eating fried mars bars....all from the uk lads.

Rugby is an english game, not an australian one.

 

[Joffaboy]

But Joffaboyboy, you seem to be forgetting:

1) The AFL abandoned its traditional suburban, Aussie Roots by introducing an American Draft...

RL tried to do the same thing but i will give you this point. Still it doesn't effect the playing of the game or its traditions

2) The AFL abandoned its traditional suburban, Aussie Roots by leaving the homeground for Faceless Concrete Bowls and Domes (Can you imagine Chelsea and Arsenal Playing at the same Home Venue?). Very American.

Subjective at best - MCG, best sporting arena in Australia, closely followed by Telstra Dome. Many many sports use big arena's, except RL of course....

3) Introducing Night games to Australian Sport, another American Tradition...

English soccer played night matches as early as the late 19th century. Hardly American, unless you are saying so because Edison was American and he invented light bulbs

4) Changing the name of the league from "VFL" to "AFL".

Victorian football League to Australian Football League as it is played all over Australia. How can the Eastern Seaboard and New Zealand be part of the "National" Football League

5)Abandoning good old Aussie Lower Grade Systems for Faceless American "Franchises".

WTF does this mean? who are "Franchised"? Not one of the 16 AFL clubs. Only franchise talked about is the Melbourne Storm which suprise suprise is a RL club.

6) Central Control of all trademarked rights to the AFL so that "Brands" can be promoted.

Whaa? So only Americans can do business????

7) That little Red Light that waits for the commercial to end before the Bounce off is done...

Yes true. Every time i watch American Aussie Rules I noticed they have a little red light before the bounce . That has to do with TV rights and the type of game football is nothing to do with Americanisms.

The AFL is more American than you give it credit for. Its anandoned alot of tradition while keeping a facade of Aussieness is Team songs and the Like...

Haven't proven one lost tradition, only subjectivity and a poor effort to put AFL into the same basket of the Americanised NRL.

And as Nick said, the total embarrassment of pouring Gatorade over the winning coach. What a bunch of gridiron wannabees

 

[Jabso]

Dear All,

I'm doing an assignment as part of my final semester of university on sport, culture and society. I've decided to do my final essay on "What is more Australian? AFL or NRL?"

Any comments, suggestions, opinions are welcomed and appriciated.

Cheers,

BB82

The Australian Emblem (or coat of arms whatever) features both a kangaroos and emu. What do these animals have in common apart from being native to Australia? They cannot walk backwards, which is to represent our "never go backwards" nature. The fact that in the game of rugby league you cannot pass forward means it is UNAUSTRALIAN!

 

[beez]

what a F**KED up post

 

[Jabso]

But Joffaboyboy, you seem to be forgetting:
2) The AFL abandoned its traditional suburban, Aussie Roots by leaving the homeground for Faceless Concrete Bowls and Domes (Can you imagine Chelsea and Arsenal Playing at the same Home Venue?). Very American.

It is hardly American. There are like 1 or 2 teams who play at the same ground in the NFL.

 

[littleduck]

It's true that Melbourne-based AFL clubs have abandoned their traditonal home ground in favour of the much larger neutral venues of the MCG and TD. That is one of the traditions all victorian AFL clubs (cept Geelong) have completely sacrificed in the pursuit of bigger profits.

But, getting back to the thread topic, I dont think it's unAustralian.

 

[Dan26]

The AFL is no more Australian than the NRL.

But the sport of Australian Rules Football is far, far more Australian than the sport of Rubgy League, which is, in fact, English.

 

[Kiza]

afl. rugby is played around the world whereas afl is unique to australia

 

[Hawkk]

The most popular sport both on the East Coast and the nation would be the most Australian.................i wonder who that would be

 

[littleduck]

There is nothing unAustralian about either code when generations of Australians have enjoyed them both and their passion has been passed on thru the generations.

Both codes have produced legendary players who have inspired others in their lives, not only as a footballers but life in general.

From the way I read the question, I dont know how anybody could say one code is more Australian over the other!

If you want to get down to basic facts of where they were invented, one was invented in the southern states of Australia and the other in a pub in the north of England. But I didnt read the question to mean that.

 

[Borry]

AFL, hands down.

The AFL is coast to coast and includes two teams from Perth and Adelaide. NRL has none, zero, zip, zilch teams from west of the Great Dividing Range.

 

[Illawarrior]

AFL, hands down.

The AFL is coast to coast and includes two teams from Perth and Adelaide. NRL has none, zero, zip, zilch teams from west of the Great Dividing Range.

Docker, you've gotta realise that in country NSW alone there are as many people living there as Adelaide and Perth combined. The population of NSW and QLD is half the Australian population. On a map the AFL looks as if it's national, but trust me, it's as popular in League Territory as NRL is in Aussie Rules territory. Both only make up half of the Australian Football culture.

If the Super League war didn't see the demise of the Adelaide and Perth clubs, they'd still be here today but that wouldn't mean that the NRL would be more "Australian".

The question is ridiculous.
I agree with the comment that cricket is the most loved sport across the country, and it was invented in England!

 

[cos789]

NRL and NFL (gridiron by its proper name if you going to use the league acronyms), are nothing like each other in the rules and how they are played.
.

RL came form RU just as American football came from RU with one forward pass.

 

[Illawarrior]

RL came form RU just as American football came from RU with one forward pass.

True.
The same with Aussie Rules originating from Gaelic Football, a strong Irish influence in Victoria.

This thread is pointless.

 

[cos789]

There is nothing unAustralian about either code
.

So what you are saying is that the NRL is no more Australian than the NBL , the NSL , baseball , or the Australian gridiron .????????

 

[Dan26]

True.
The same with Aussie Rules originating from Gaelic Football, a strong Irish influence in Victoria.

This thread is pointless.

This is not true. There is nothing in the history of the evolution of Austrlian Football, to suggest it came from Gaelic football. Nothing. The similarity of the codes is nothing more than coincidental.

 

[fabulousphil]

True.
The same with Aussie Rules originating from Gaelic Football, a strong Irish influence in Victoria.

This thread is pointless.

I believe this has been shown to be false, although there was a strong Irish influence in Vic at the time.

 

[fabulousphil]

By Robert Pascoe, historian, author, Dean of arts at Victoria University

Divided by the Barassi Line



Why Sydney plays Rugby and Melbourne plays Rules




The winter game in Australia is football. Football in Australia can mean one of two things: the codes of Rugby played in Sydney, in Brisbane, and throughout their hinterlands, or the strange indigenous game known as Australian Rules, which dominates Melbourne, Hobart, Launceston, Adelaide, Kalgoorlie, Penh and the towns in between.(1) Drawing on the surname of the Australian game's most famous player, the late historian Ian Turner once declared: .Australia is divided by a deep cultural rift known as the Barassi tine. It runs between Canberra, Broken Hill, Birds-ville and Maningrida [Arnhem Land] and it divides Australia between Rugby and Rules.'(2) To the east of this imaginary Barassi Line, Rugby Union and Rugby League are by far the most important versions of football played, producing players equal to the best from New Zealand, Great Britain, South Africa and France. But to the west of this dividing line, a home-grown form of football was invented in Melbourne and spread widely after its official origins in 1858. Closer to Gaelic football or speedball than other variants of football, Australian Rules is a quick, high-scoring game which demands strength at ground level and athletic aerial abilities above the turf. It is not only a historical puzzle how such, a unique game could have developed in Australia -a small nation of 18 million people and derivative in most things -but why a continent with so few cultural or linguistic differences should have become divided so completely between Rugby and Rules.

The first clue to distinguishing between Sydney and Melbourne is to recognise the significance of their dates of founding, one in 1788 and the other in 1834. Between these two dates in British history, enormous changes in economy and polity took place. This half-century was characterised by the industrial revolution, the end of slavery in British possessions, dramatic developments in the history of science, and the emergence of working-class movements. The first British settlers of Melbourne were far removed in background and experience from their grandparents who had established Sydney. The 'fragment thesis' holds that colonial cultures are powerfully conditioned by the fragment of metropolitan culture which caused them to exist in the first place. The styles of economic development and political culture which typify Australia's two major cities are as divergent as those separating New York from Boston, Glasgow from Edinburgh, and St Petersburg from Moscow. The Sydney - Melbourne rivalry is equally intense as a result.(3) Briefly put, Sydney's politics have always been uncompromising, with a winner-take-all attitude to the spoils. Melbourne, the headquarters of both national trade unionism and the nation's conservative political party, has had a richer and more participatory political history. Sydney has had Tammany Hall and secret civilian militias; modem Melbourne is better known for its mass demonstrations and soap-box orators. This difference in political style can be explained by differences in social conflict between the two cities.

Sydney's elite made its money from the city's entrepot role in South-east Asia. As a commercial elite, it has always valued entrepreneurial skills ahead of liberal education, and Sydney's private school system is not well developed. Sydney's elite was also overwhelmingly Anglican, and its working class has historically been strongly Roman Catholic. Its two codes of Rugby correspondingly divide along class lines – the amateur Rugby Union developed in the 1870s while Rugby League, proletarian in its social base, emerged in conjunction with the development of working-class organisations towards the end of the nineteenth century. Sydney's Rugby competition started in earnest only in the early 1870s, and developed across the suburbs much more slowly than Melbourne's football competition, not reaching fully-fledged form until 1900. There was undoubtedly more scope for an aquatic culture to flourish in Sydney, with its abundance of harbours and bays. Sydney lacked a network of private schools - King's School (1831), Sydney Grammar (1857) and Newington College (1863) were the only major schools in colonial Sydney. It also lacked the wide open spaces of Melbourne's plains and Melbourne's flat terrain, necessary conditions for playing areas and transporting fans by cable-tram. Generous parklands and cheap transport fares were crucial to Australian football's early appeal. It has also been claimed that Sydney's elite was less skilled at the administration of sport.(4) This insight can be expressed in different terms: that for Sydney's gentry, sport was an exclusive rather than inclusive activity (dramatically so in the case of polo or yachting) and did not call for the same complexity of administration as mass sport.

The Melbourne story is quite different. Its elite was as much Presbyterian as Anglican in background, and more sympathetic to the possibility of self-improvement for the lower orders. Melbourne's initial growth was triggered by a massive influx of immigrants during the 1850s goldrush - this was a highly skilled and literate population with advanced political ideas. In Melbourne in 1856 organised labour won the right to an eight-hour working day, and other industrial or political reforms followed. Melbourne developed as a mercantile, financial and manufacturing centre - enterprises based on white-collar professions - and so prized more highly than Sydney the graduate skills developed through education. Melbourne life was dominated by schools such as Scotch College (1851), Geelong Grammar (1855), Melbourne Grammar (1858), Geelong College (1861), Wesley College (1866), and Xavier College (1878). Sydney remained a more international city, open to external influences, while Melbourne became a culturally closed city once the goldrush population settled down. Melbourne housed the Federal Parliament from 1901 to 1927, when Canberra was built Melbourne was fundamentally liberal: politically progressive, but socially conservative. At its heart Melbourne was a more inclusive city, and its own football code developed and grew as a Saturday afternoon recreation for players and spectators from all social classes. Rugby and Rules suited Sydney and Melbourne respectively because of these very different histories.






John Coleman was one of the most lethal goalkickers to play Australian Rules football, in a short career ended by serious knee injury. Coleman kicked 537 goals in only 98 games. (Football Life, May 1973, p. 26. Just Collectables!)



The connection between the culture of a city and its preference for one sport above another is to be found in the value of organised recreation for the onlookers and the participants alike. Team sports like football are a powerful metaphor for social conflict Each time a group of spectators watch a football match, they are looking at themselves mirrored in the play and learning something about their own lives. The sense of catharsis, of profound emotional release, which comes at the end of a football game, is the signal that some deeply significant reaffirmation of one's place in the larger social order has taken place. Organised sporting contests call up emotions as profound as that powerful sense of Good versus Evil in the ceremonies of organised religion. This larger link between a city and its game has within it a smaller link between the players and the coach: the players are us, the citizenry, and the coach embodies the wisdom of the game. Watching or playing a football match is not merely a technical exercise, it also engages us because the game contains meaning. The content of that meaning is to do with social conflict and struggle.

What exactly is the social struggle to which football refers? The two codes are quite different in appearance. One passionate observer gave this poetic description of Australian football: 'Aussie Rules is an exhilarating balletic spectacle, high-leaping artistry. The bladdery objet d'art is wrenched from the sky five metres up in a catatonic twist of the body... A magnificent pas de deux of man and ball terminating in a graceful somersault to the earth...' This spectator had a different impression of Rugby: 'Overdeveloped beef-cakes galumphing a few steps, in gangs of threes and fours, towards the obliteration of a witless plodder clutching with ten thumbs the oval pigskin to an ample belly...'(5) Stripped of its embellishments, this description conjures up the contrasting images of the two codes. The attraction of Rules is the athleticism and agility of individual players, while Rugby's appeal is rather more the strength and power of players working in groups. The laws governing each code preserve and regulate these fundamental differences between Rules and Rugby. The laws are refined and recodified according to arbitrary (that is, anthropological) principles. The laws can be (and are) changed and modified from one season to the next, but these refinements are undertaken by regulatory bodies which are mindful of community expectations and assumptions. A good example of this occurred at the conclusion of the 1993 season, when the Australian Football League (AFL) conducted a mail questionnaire of its members in order to test the popularity of proposed rule changes.


There are five basic laws governing Australian Rules which distinguish it from Rugby and reflect Melbourne's different social history.(6) A basic feature of the Australian game which puzzles aficionados of Rugby (and of English football) is the absence of an off-side rule. In cultural terms, no particular privilege attaches to those who are defending property. The off-side rule only makes sense if one presupposes that those who are defending their goal (for which read one's own property) should have some particular advantage. In cultural terms it is analogous to feudal assumptions about the inviolability of aristocratic land ownership. Before the emergence of capitalism, for land to change hands was the exception rather than the rule. Australian football, to the contrary, traces its cultural origins to mid-nineteenth-century laissez-faire capitalism, and presumes that defending teams in any kind of contest deserve no particular advantage.

Australian Rules differs from Rugby in a second respect. Its laws concentrate much more on ball-handling and rather less on man-to-man tackling. Kicking, marking and handballing are all features of the Australian game; the conventions controlling these aspects of the play have been carefully codified and consistently regulated to a far greater extent than the laws relating to shepherding, tackling and interfering with the movement of other players. It is in this man-to-man area that the greatest degree of ambiguity exists in Australian Rules. Exactly when an attempt to mark from behind another player concedes a free kick, to offer a notorious example, is inconsistently umpired. In short, the individual's actions with the ball provide the focus of the game - in terms of the political culture of Melbourne, this focus derives from the notion of the individual as a free agent which began to dominate Western discourse in the mid-nineteenth century. The triumph of individualism was at the expense of the estates, the earlier notion of society made up of collectivities, and it is this older view of social life that Rugby extols. Rugby's rules about man-on-man conflict are not nearly so ambiguous, and require the players to form scrums, line-outs and other group actions which give expression to the notion of collectivity.

Like the English and American codes of football, Rugby may be distinguished in another decisive way from Australian Rules, namely in its clear delineation of property. Property in the pre-capitalist mind-set is fixed and given, marked out in zones and in a rectangular field of precise dimensions. English football similarly presumes a regular pitch of invariant dimensions. Not so in Australian football: the playing field is oval and rather carelessly measured. Australian Rules fields of play vary quite considerably in terms of their length and width, depending in fact on how much open space had originally been allotted. This laissez-faire attitude to property reflects the assumptions of a post-feudal society, a key one of which is that land can be readily bought and sold. Similarly, the internal markings within the oval are a great deal less restrictive than the English and American equivalents. The Rugby field is uniformly 75 yards wide by 110 yards long, marked out with 10 and 25 yard lines; the internal dimensions vary slightly between Rugby League and Rugby Union, but they both operate on basically the same principles. Land is presumed to be finite, and the territory of Contest unchanging. Significantly, American baseball, which emerged in the 1840s in similar political conditions to those prevailing in Melbourne in the 1850s, shares with Australian Rules a careless indifference to the outer measurements of the field.

Then, perhaps most striking of all the contrasts, there is the fundamentally different attitude to authority in the Australian game. While the 'referee' in Rugby and in the English football game came to enjoy a send-off power, no such entitlement attaches to the 'umpire' in the Australian Rules context (at senior levels), and attempts to introduce it have always been resisted. The former case mimics the absolutist state, the latter the negotiability inherent in modem democratic societies. Once again, this curious difference can be traced back to colonial conditions in Melbourne - Australian Rules, after all, was codified only four years after the Eureka rebellion in Victoria. Umpires were added later and were given very limited powers. In the English case, adopted by Sydney, the state has an omnipresent authority; in the other, indigenously Australian variant, the whole point of the game sometimes appears to be the crowd's quarrel with the 'man-in-white'. Laws about many aspects of the Australian game, especially about free kicks, are almost perversely ambiguous. To make matters even more ambiguously democratic, the number of Australian umpires has been increased during successive periods, leading to shared rather than despotic decision-making.

Where this cultural analysis leads is to a provocative suggestion – that Melbourne's football game very deeply reflects the liberal social democratic milieu in which it was formed. The class struggle the game unobtrusively mirrors is one in which the contending forces are engaged in hegemonic struggle rather than knock-down battle. There is no fixed centre, there is a curious interweaving of the two teams, and the players move as interdependent individuals. In the other codes, notably in the case of Sydney's Rugby, battle is joined on either side of a centre line, and the underlying motif is brute force. Each team operates as a bloc rather than as a group of individuals. The social struggle reflects conditions in pre-industrial Britain and the early years of the penal colony in New South Wales. Early Rugby was closely associated with the military regiments based in Sydney.(7) It is a game enjoyed mostly by people who believe that life's essential struggle is one of force, and who live in a city whose political life is built around the same assumptions. In the terms of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, the Sydney Rugby style is a triumph of dominio (coercion), Melbourne's football a contest around egemonia (consent).

Sydney's international outlook has opened it to the world. Appropriately, the only successful indigenous game produced in Australia developed in the rather more inward-looking manufacturing city which grew up further south fifty years later.

This broad-brush comparison between Rugby and Rules can be used to explain many other features of the codes. Women are far more numerous in a Rules crowd because the game belongs to an era of greater participation by women in the struggle between the haves and the have-nots. Also, the rule changes permitted in each code over the intervening decades tended to reinforce rather than challenge the basic cultural assumptions in each game. The role of the umpire in Australian Rules, for example, has consistently been made ambiguous and contestable due to the number of changes to the rules governing 'free kicks'. For it to be otherwise would be to concede to the state an absolutism which the citizens of goldrush Victoria found repugnant. The laws of the games are inherently conservative and help to fossilise the cultural meanings embedded in each game. We now turn to examine those laws of Rules more carefully.





©Robert Pascoe 1995

Published in The Winter Game. The Text Publishing Company, Melbourne, Australia, 1995 (pp. xi-xvii).







Notes



1 Throughout what follows, except where it is obvious, the term Rugby is used to include both Rugby (Union) and Rugby League. Usually football refers to Australian Rules football, as played or codified from time to time.

2 Ian Turner, 'The Ron Barassi Memorial Lecture 1978', in Game Hutchinson, The Great Australian Book of Football Stories, 1983, p. 290.

3 Jim Davidson, ed., The Sydney-Melbourne Book is the definitive summary of this complicated story. The chapter comparing sporting traditions is by Brian Stoddart. Refer also to the work of Lionel Frost in comparing the various Australian colonies, Australian Cities in Comparative View, McPhee Gribble, Ringwood, Vic., 1990.

4 Richard Cashman and Tom Hickie, 'The divergent sporting cultures of Sydney and Melbourne', Sporting Traditions, vol. 7, no. 1, November 1990, pp. 26-46; see also M. P. Sharp, 'Australian football in Sydney before 1914', Sporting Traditions, vol. 4, no. 1, November 1987, pp.27-45.

5 Frank Hainsworth, Letter to the Editor, The Age, Melbourne, 3 June 1993, p.14.

6 These five basic differences figure strongly in the April 1994 television campaign ('I'd like to see that!') to promote Rules in Sydney and Brisbane (Herald-Sun, Melbourne, 6 April 1994, p. 5).

7 Thomas V. Hickie, They Ran with the Ball.

 

[Tezmyster]

The reason why the state sport of NSW is NRL or Rugby is because 100 or so years ago all the major schools (were catholic i think) wanted to keep to english colonial ways and didnt allow AFL to be played, hence why NSW people hate afl they have been braught up for generations to hate!

Damn nazis

And yes this is true, do your research

Firstly, the Nazis were German not English, so at least get your countries right.

Secondly, I was born in QLD and moved to NSW about 3 and a half years ago, and most people here I see in both states prefer NRL, but accept AFL as a sport. I've never been to Melbourne but from I understand the same kind of acceptance can't be found down there for the NRL

 

[Dan26]

On a map the AFL looks as if it's national, but trust me, it's as popular in League Territory as NRL is in Aussie Rules territory. Both only make up half of the Australian Football culture.

Australian Rules Football is far more popular in it's "non traditional" areas than Rugby League is in its non-traditional areas. In some areas of southern New South Wales, such as Wagga, the split between the codes is about 50-50 (give or take.) You can't say the same about any location in regional Victoria. Aussie Rules is far bigger in SE Qld than Rugby League is in Victoria.

I agree with the comment that cricket is the most loved sport across the country, and it was invented in England!

Cricket is not the most loved sport in the country at all. Whilst it is "equal" in all parts of the country, it only really has major interst at the International level. The Pura Cup is effectively State of Origin, yet struggles to get 1,000 to a days play. The Australian team gets 50,000 to a one day international, yet they have the whole country behind the team. Essendon and Collingwood, who represent about 30% of Victoria only, can get 80,000 to one game.

Imagine if Cricket was not international and was only played "within" Australia, domestically. There would be next to no interest. It's somewhat comparable to Soccer in this country. The Socceroos can pack out the MCG but the domestic competition has limited interest.

What really tests the interest level of a sport is NOT the international level (because, let's face it, anything is big at International level) but the bread and butter of the domestic home and away competition. The AFL is the second biggest crowd drawing league in the world behind the NFL, and the AFL represents the highest level of Australian Rules football, which is clearly the nation's number one supported game.

 

[fabulousphil]

The reason why the state sport of NSW is NRL or Rugby is because 100 or so years ago all the major schools (were catholic i think) wanted to keep to english colonial ways and didnt allow AFL to be played, hence why NSW people hate afl they have been braught up for generations to hate!

Damn nazis

And yes this is true, do your research

Are you for f u cking real, catholics (in general) did not want anything to do with the English system thats why catholic schools started you moron.

What i find surprising is that top notch catholic schools now provide the bulk of australias rugby union sides when initially the game would have been shunned as a English game............... money always works.

In fact i think you will find that the micks are also top of the pile in amatuer and schoolboy footy in AR and schoolboy footy in RL

 

[Tezmyster]

afl. rugby is played around the world whereas afl is unique to australia

Too true..... AFANA .....oops, I seem to have posted a link to an American AFL league, I guess it is played outside of Australia ..... San Diego Lions .....oops, I've done it again, it's the Brisbane Lions US based sister team!!!

 

[Tezmyster]

The Australian Emblem (or coat of arms whatever) features both a kangaroos and emu. What do these animals have in common apart from being native to Australia? They cannot walk backwards, which is to represent our "never go backwards" nature. The fact that in the game of rugby league you cannot pass forward means it is UNAUSTRALIAN!

You can't pass forward in AFL either, so that arguement holds little merit.

 

[cos789]

You can't pass forward in AFL either, so that arguement holds little merit.

You cannot legally throw the ball in Australian football but one may pass the ball by hand or foot in which direction one chooses but preferably not in the direction of the Umpire , being the person to judge the sport as distinct from areferree whose job it is to separate opponents in blood sports .