World Footy News

Press release from the AFL

Australian Football League Chief Operating Officer Gillon McLachlan today announced the AFL had agreed to a new and exclusive deal with ESPN for its broadcast rights into the United Kingdom and Ireland for the remainder of 2009 through to the end of the 2011 AFL season.

The agreement will see ESPN air three matches each round of the home and away season(s), as well as a number of Finals, including the Grand Final. All matches will be broadcast on ESPN’s new channel, which is set to launch on Monday 3 August on Sky Channel 417, and will also be available in High Definition via Sky Channel 443. Coverage will kick off with the Round 19 blockbuster between finals contenders Carlton and Geelong on Friday 7 August, live from the MCG.

This weekend sees several international matches, with Germany and the Czech Republic playing in Mitteleschenbach and the Jakarta and Singapore clubs fighting it out at Cibubur Oval in Jakarta, Indonesia. Even bigger still is the return to action of Canada and the United States for their first international since IC08.

Traditionally the US Revolution has been too strong for Canada's Northwind, but in 2007 that changed with the northerners winning for the first time, tasting success on home soil. The US gets a chance for revenge in this Ohio match, and with Canada finishing 6th at IC08, just one spot above the US, a close match could be expected. However that was Canada's best finish and they seem to be on the rise, where asfor the US 7th spot represented a disappointing slide. Was 2007/08 a permanent crossing point in the trajectory of their football abilities, or an aberration that the Revos will turn around?

Wolverhampton has become the latest in a string of cities in the English Midlands to create an Aussie Rules club to join the ARUK's Central Division in time for the 2010 season.

The Wolverhampton Wolverines, as the club will be known, are looking to recruit early with training sessions being planned for the end of this summer. Added to this, regular friendly matches being played over the course of winter 09/10 should see the Wolverines in competitive shape come the season's start in April 2010.

The friendlies will be against established sides such as the 2009 Central Division ladder toppers Huddersfield Rams and second placed Birmingham Bears, as well as other newly-formed teams such as Cambridge Hippos.

The Wolverines' founding member Ian Mitchell has played the 2009 season for the Birmingham Bears. Mitchell tells us "I'm keen to see the sport expand across the Midlands and the UK as a whole, and I see The Wolverines being an excellent starting point for this in Wolverhampton."

The Wolverines are recruiting for players of any level of experience from experts to complete beginners, volunteers to help run the non-playing side of the club and also any potential sponsors or donors to fund the initial set-up of the club.

Anyone interested in playing footy in Wolverhampton can contact the club via their Facebook page.

The Czech Lions will be taking the Autobahn to the town of Mitteleschenbach, near Nürnberg, this weekend for a Central European showdown with the Germany's national team - the Black Eagles.

In a first for Czech footy, this year's Lions squad will be built around locals and other non-Australian talent, with only a handful of Aussies filling the gaps. The Germans for their part will be fielding a team of home-grown talent, as they have done in all tests since 2007.

The August 1st match came about through an offer to host a match of footy by the organisers of the Nürnberg Australian Festival. While 2009 is the first time the festival has included a match of Aussie Rules, the whole event is now in its third year, organised by a group of local businesses - including an Emu Farm - and the local Nürnberg Australian community.

In a sensational case of switching codes, the AFL today welcomed the signing of Rugby League Australian representative Karmichael Hunt to play with the Gold Coast Football Club and also to take on a game development role with the AFL and AFL Queensland. AFL Chief Executive Officer Andrew Demetriou said the signing of Karmichael Hunt (pictured with coach Guy McKenna) was a coup for the club and showed that it was an innovative club that was prepared to look outside the square in recruiting the best talent.

Mr Demetriou said Hunt was an exciting AFL prospect who had welcomed the prospect of staying and playing elite sport in Queensland and also in helping to promote and develop the AFL code in the state through a development role with the AFL and AFL Queensland. He said while it was not unusual for junior athletes from other codes to cross to AFL, it was the first time an established rugby league player had crossed over since Ray Smith in the 1970s who crossed codes to play more than 100 games with Essendon and Melbourne.

“When it was reported that Karmichael was considering changing codes and moving overseas and that he was serious about considering a career in the AFL, we were happy to look at ways that he could play with Gold Coast Football Club and work with the AFL to promote the code in his home state of Queensland,” Mr Demetriou said. Hunt, born in Auckland, reportedly played something like 9 games of Aussie Rules in his final year of High School, in Brisbane.

The 2009 International Rules Series will be deferred for 12 months, the Australian Football League (AFL) and the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) announced today. AFL Chief Executive Andrew Demetriou said he had spoken to GAA Director General Paraic Duffy on a number of occasions over the last week and the two organisations had agreed to defer the series to October 2010, with two Tests to be played then in Ireland.

Australia had been due to tour Ireland after both country's respective seasons conclude this September, but Mr Demetriou said the world economic situation had caused a major re-think for the AFL, prompting it to seek to defer the series for 12 months. Mr Demetriou said the decision to postpone the series for 12 months had been a difficult decision to make as the AFL valued the GAA relationship very strongly, and the AFL had given its commitment it would tour Ireland for two Test matches in October 2010.

The city of Cambridge hope to join the likes of Derby, Leicester and Wolverhampton in creating a new Aussie Rules team in central England for the 2010 season.

There have been numerous multi-cultural Australian football programs developed in Australia over the last few years, seeking to introduce recent immigrants to the indigenous sport, both as fans and players. We've reported on many of those, most of which have been based in Victoria. That's excellent for community involvement and the health of the game in Victoria, but has the same level of attention or funding been present across the rest of the country?

worldfootynews.com suspects there will be a major increase in AFL support for such programs in western Sydney to help pave the way for community support of the likely 18th AFL licence. But it is important that all Australian states embrace this concept, so it's pleasing to be able to report some basic programs also being introduced in South Australia, such as a Multicultural themed round.

The SANFL is South Australia's state league and one of the game's more prolific breeding grounds for future AFL talent, along with the Victorian and Western Australian leagues. The upcoming round of matches (Saturday, August 1st) are being dubbed the SANFL 'be active' Multicultural Round. The following is further information from the SANFL.

Readers of WFN may also have been following the Footy Almanac a site featuring community football commentary, mainly covering AFL and local league footy in Australia but with a growing number of stories on international footy.

WFN stories to appear on the Footy Almanac in the past few weeks include those on the Tromsø footy club and last week's story on the Czech and Croatian local leagues. However, one from a different source is the article Irish news: Australian footy comp growing in Ireland from Peter Lenaghan, chronicling the current challenges faced by the ARFLI.

Also on the almanac is the "Middle East Correspondent" Rod Gillett. While most of his stories cover country football history in Australia, there are a few about the AFL Middle East, including the formation of a new team in Bahrain, which will bring the AFLME's club tally to seven in the coming season.

Editors of the Almanac are Paul Daffey and John Harms, Daffey being the country and suburban footy reporter from Melbourne newspaper The Age and author of a few books on the subject, inlcuding the well-known collection "Local Rites". Harms is also a writer, with his "Loose Men Everywhere" based on his experiences as an Australian rules fan growing up in the "heathen territory" of country Queensland, a subject footy fans overseas could often relate to.

For the past few seasons, the bulk of matches for the Czech Lions and Croatian Knights has been supplied by the Tri-Nations series they conducted together with the Kangaroos from Austria's capital Vienna.

This year however has seen both clubs shift their focus onto kick-starting domestic competitions, with the Czech AFL playing their fourth match between the All-Stars and Marauders this week, and the Croatian Association of Australian Football now up to six matches and counting between cross-town rivals the Zagreb Hawks and Agram Power in their second local league season.

These developments are part of a wider trend across Europe, where former one-club-countries such as the Netherlands, Norway and Austria are seeing the foundations laid for local comps.

Norway will soon see its third club take the field, with the newly-created Ås Battlers set to take on the Oslo Trolls on August 23.

After a slow start to the season in the Oslo area, the match will be Norway's first domestic inter-club clash. The team in Ås, a small town just outside the Norwegian capital, started training earlier this year under the leadership of Adam O'Toole.

Since 2008, Barcelona's Aussie Rules club the Cornellà Bocs have counted among their number a player by the name of Juan Carlos Herrera. The Spanish name doesn't seem out of place at first glance, but Herrera's background is a little different from the usual kind of recruit found kicking the footy in Catalonia - he's actually from Bolivia, and possibly even more surprisingly, he's just one of a growing number of Latin Americans who have picked up the Australian game in Europe.

With large numbers of Latinos migrating to Spain for better career opportunities, the Catalan footy league has counted Brazilians, Argentines and Ecuadorians in its ranks over the years, with the Catalonia-based Argentines even fielding a squad at last year's WAFF World 9s in Valls.

In France too, last week's French Cup saw Venezuelan Marlys Maldonaldo pull on the boots for the Toulouse Crocodiles. A search through the Footy Record reveals a number of Brazilians have kicked the footy in Sweden, and the current games record holder for the Helsinki Heatseekers is one Fernando Leon, a Colombian who also made the trip to Melbourne last year as part of the Finland Icebreakers squad at the 2008 International Cup.

Having left his home town of Santa Cruz in Bolivia ten years ago to search for work in Spain, Herrera's journey to become probably the first Bolivian to take up Australian rules football began when he accompanied a French friend of his to see the Bocs play a match in Valls.