World Footy News

The Randers Dockers last year took the field in Denmark's Jutland 9s regional league, thereby becoming the first new club in the Danish Australian Football League in over a decade.

Founded by Jens Djernes, one of two members of the Denmark Vikings selected in the World All-Stars at the IC08, the Randers club have recently officialised a partnership arrangement between the Randers AFC and AFL club Fremantle, becoming one of a growing number of Dockers partner clubs worldwide.

"When we founded the club, I emailed the Dockers and told them about the club. It took a while to hear back from them, but when I did, it turned out they'd already been talking to Port Malmö and the North Copenhagen Barracudas."

"I was here in WA and they let me know they were interested in having a meeting. They knew they were going to support one club in Denmark and they wanted to know where their money could best support development of the sport. North Copenhagen are one of the oldest clubs in the DAFL and have always been the Barracudas, so they didn't want to become the Dockers."

"When they looked at Port Malmö, it's an established club who are doing pretty well, they won the premiership last year and they've been fairly successful over the last few seasons. So it was decided by Fremantle that they wanted to support Randers as a new club, rather than an established side like Port Malmö."

Wade Spilcker from the Fremantle FC says the Dockers receive a large number of requests for partnership agreements from around the world, assessing them on a club-by-club basis.

"We've already got quite a few partner clubs worldwide, there's Hamburg, Cincinnati, the Leith Dockers in Scotland, Bristol Dockers in England, and now Randers in Denmark. Ideally we'd like to have a partner club in every league playing Australian rules internationally."

"It's partly about building the Dockers brand of course, but it's also about what we can do to support the growth of Australian rules football."

"The kinds of things we can do for a clubs overseas are to help with things like jumpers, balls and so on, which obviously can be hard to come by when you're on the other side of the world from Australia."

Djernes explains that this kind of material support is exactly what Randers need at this early stage of development.

"The Dockers are sending over a full set of guernseys, socks and training balls, along with t-shirts and goal flags, that kind of stuff. Basically everything we need as far as materials go to start the club."

"I hope it will make it easier to get new players, like, when we've had potential players down to training, we were just kicking a ball around on a park and didn't have anything else. It didn't look serious to other people who come to see the game for the first time."

"What I've said to the Dockers is that, for a start, we'll look at just being a strong team in the Jutland 9s, but we think there's the potential in Randers to be a stand-alone team in the DAFL Premier League. It's a town of 60,000 people, so I think it's big enough to support a premier league side.

"Fremantle of course like the idea of us going into the premier league if that's possible, but we're not going to pull out of the Shinboners until the others are able to stand on their own. We've got a gentlemen's agreement with Aalborg and Århus that we'll support each other."

"Having another premier league side will of course add more travel for the teams on the islands and in Sweden, but the Shinboners have to travel more than anyone else already, and I think the majority will see it as a good thing for the league."

The Randers Australian Football Club can be contacted via their new website at www.randers-dockers.dk.