World Footy News

This is part three of the six part USAFL Season Preview Series as we preview the North Central Regional.

This is part two of the six part series on the USAFL Season Preview as we preview the Southeast Division.

Southeast Region

The southeast regional has the most dynamic teams in the nation as three of the top ten teams in the nation Nashville (#5), North Carolina (#9) and Fort Lauderdale (#10) are in this region. This is a potent region and will have a big say in the Divisional makeup on the road to Columbus.

This week we run a special 6 part series as Alex Benjamin looks across the whole of the US and back at their 2013 season and gives his predictions on the 2014 season.   Looking at each team you will see a summary with their final 2013 record, points and where they finished in the unofficial standings last year, Alex then gives his prediction where he thinks teams will be ranked ahead of the 2014 Nationals based on how he thinks they might perform this year.  The summary for each team begins as follows:-

Team (Win-Loss record 2013, Points for 2013 based on wins, Finish Rank: Where the team finished 2013 on Alex's USAFL Weekly Report unofficial ladder)

Over to you Alex...

This week's international broadcast networks and airing times below.

The Irish Warriors have named the first 14 squad members for the 2014 AFL International Cup to be staged in Melbourne, Australia from August 9th to 23rd this year. The Warriors are the current holders of the International Cup, having won the most recent tournament in 2011 at the Melbourne Cricket Ground after a dramatic comeback victory over Papua New Guinea.

They are also the only nation to have won the tournament twice - having also won the inaugural tournament in 2002.

The 14 selected are European-based players, and the majority of them played in the 2013 European Cup winning side. This is a completely new selection of Irish-based players from the victorious 2011 team with most of that squad now retired from International duty.

Ed: This story courtesy of Harley Vague.

It was a great mild Sunday afternoon for Football. The Zagreb Dockers arrived early and setup a canopy, barbeque and refreshments. The first game of the double header was between the Zagreb Dockers and the new team, the Slavonski Tigers journeying from roughly 200km east of Zagreb.

Even though the new team was winless in its first two outings, the Tigers had performed well. The Dockers had a very tall ruckman and a much larger squad and opened their scoring account in terms of seconds but from then on the game went goal for goal with the Tigers slowly edging in front.

As was hinted in the recent story North Lanarkshire Wolves join Scottish party, yet another Aussie Rules team has entered the Scottish football scene, this time in the heart of Glasgow. As the game undergoes a radical and positive series of changes, the Greater Glasgow Giants are the latest to take advantage of this fertile period in the game’s history.

A recent interview with Douglas Hunter, Scottish Australian Rules football stalwart and architect of the new club, gives a good account of the need for the new club, the processes they are currently undergoing for their entry to the SARFL in 2015 and some idea of their dreams and prospects.

“The team will be based at the moment in Glasgow city centre until we know where most players will come from. Recruitment is mainly from Gumtree [social media site] and from Glasgow University. We have ten players at the moment including one Aussie, three former Clansmen national team players and one who also played in the first three AIS v AFL Europe Under 21 games. The rest are from Gaelic football, football, and rugby. The coach is me.”

Last weekend a squad of talented Scottish footballers, selected in the national Scottish Clansmen team, boarded flights to Madrid to take on the Spanish Bulls at the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid (Autonomous University of Madrid). It is the first match of an agreed two year deal between AFL Scotland and AFL Espana which will see the Spanish team travel to Scotland for the rematch in 2015.

Whilst there is still some conjecture about the final score, it appears that the most accurate is a victory to the Scotland team over Spain 77 to 27.

Players in the Scottish team came from established clubs, the Glasgow Sharks, Edinburgh Bloods and Aberdeen Eagles (who are not competing in the SARFL this season) as well as newer or emerging clubs including the Kingdom Kangaroos and Falkirk Silverbacks (Martin Bell being a Glasgow Shark who is now putting together the fledgling Falkirk team). Also in the squad were players currently lining up with the Copenhagen X-Men in the DAFL and also the Wimbledon Hawks from the AFL London competition.

Australian Rules football in Scotland is certainly taking plenty of twists and turns throughout 2014 as it prepares for a bigger and brighter future. Whilst the Aberdeen Eagles had to withdraw temporarily from the SARFL for 2014, that void is quickly being replaced and more by the emergence of a wave of new clubs positioning themselves for potential full competition in 2015.

Recently, World Footy News reported on the emergence of another local club in Falkirk Silverbacks to expand Scottish stable, but a further side hit the ground running in the same area: the North Lanarkshire Wolves.

Nikolas McGuire is the driving force behind the new North Lanarkshire team, a council district heralding from the outer eastern suburbs of Glasgow and extending almost to Falkirk. His connections to the Glasgow Sharks have led to another team growing in this fertile Australian Rules football catchment.

The city of Uppsala is the fourth largest in Sweden, and is located just 70 kilometres (a shade over 40 miles) to the north-west of the nation’s capital city, Stockholm. It will also soon be home to the newest Australian Rules football team in Sweden, with a view to competing in the SAFF (Stockholm Australian Football Federation) by 2015.

According to Jorg Pareigis, the president of AFL Sweden, “Uppsala had their first training tonight and are all up for starting a team. Greg Buckley (2nd cousin of [Collingwood] legend Nathan Buckley), Mats Wurmbach from Solna, Tim Gould from Bromma and Daniel Boström (former Karlstad player) are the core team.”

It is very early stages yet for the Uppsala team, and will be some time before they are equipped to play at the highest national level.  But it is another feather in the cap of AFL Sweden’s expansion and for the ongoing growth and popularity of the game in the Scandinavian nation.

AFLNZ have made their second annual selection of their Heritage team. To be eligible player must be born in New Zealand or have one parent born there. This is more stringent than the one for the NZ national rugby league team which has a handful of Aussie-born players. Anyone looking at the Rugby League world Cup would also see that eligibility criteria are looser than those applied in the selection of this team.
 

AFL New Zealand Heritage team selector Simon Black noted the broad pool of players to select from. “There is a significant number of players with New Zealand heritage running around the AFL, so we were able to fill a full team.”

AFL New Zealand CEO Robert Vanstam would like to see the team play a test match against Australia one day.  Vanstam believes the growing interest in AFL across the ditch, and from expat New Zealanders in Australia, means a trans-Tasman Test could replace the hybrid International Rules series against Ireland.

“Why would you ever want to play them with a round ball when you can play a real game of footy against another country?’’ he said.
 

New Danish club, the Odense Lions, have combined with Swedish club, the Helsingborg Saints, to hit the ground running with a competitive hit-out for two women’s club teams. The club was delighted to provide an interview to World Footy News recounting the lead up to the event and a description off the day. We already reported on the Helsingborg women's team in Helsingborg Saints Aim To Start Sweden's First Women's Team, and now they have a bona fide opponent.

“In 2013 the Helsingborg made a women’s team called the Helsingborg Saints Ladies, but because of the lack of potential opponents no games was played. Denmark had at this point no women’s team and only junior girls were playing Australian Rules footy.”

“The Odense Lions, who to this point had only been in a nine per side tournament as a team and were training indoors during the long Danish winter, were then contacted by a girl interested in trying out Australian Rules football. The coaches of the Lions were not slow to try and recruit the new girl and she was asked if she was interested in coming down and try out, even though we had no women’s team at the time. The lack of other female players did not scare this young woman, who would go on to be the captain for new team, the Odense Lionesses. She showed up to the first training session in 2014 with two friends and from that day they almost never missed a training session.”