World Footy News

Andrew Werner, older brother Joe Werner and Joe's wife Katy Werner have decided to follow their sporting dreams to Australia. Joe Werner was a standout basketballer for UW Lacrosse and was also picked up as a tight end for the Green Bay Packers. In 2008 he was offered the opportunity to play for the Kilsyth Cobras in the South Eastern Australian Basketball League. This year, Joe's wife, Katy Werner, a former UW Lacrosse basketballer herself, was offered the opportunity to play for the Lady Cobras.

This week, Joe's younger brother Andrew, pictured at left with Geelong coach Mark "Bomber" Thompson, joins them both in Australia. While Joe and Katy play basketball in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne, Andrew will be heading to the other side of the continent and the country Western Australian town of Mt Barker to play Aussie Rules.

Hot favourites the Dubai Heat have defeated the Muscat Magpies by nine points to claim the inaugural AFL Middle East VB Premiership, completing the season undefeated. Simon O'Keefe of the Muscat Magpies was awarded Best on Ground in the Grand Final.

Read on for a report of the day, courtesy of AFL Middle East Commercial Manager, Stephen Nugent.

While outsiders generally associate the word "Catalonia" with the autonomous region in Spain centered around Barcelona, the Països Catalans, or "Catalan Countries" also extend north into the region of Rousillon in southern France and the tiny nation of Andorra in the Pyrenees, known for being the only nation where Catalan is the sole official language.

This year, the Lliga de Futbol Australià de Catalunya will span all three nations of the Catalan-speaking region, with the Cornellà Bocs and Belfry Valls from the autonomous region of Catalonia in Spain, one team from the Aussie Rules community in Andorra, and the newly formed Perpignan Tigers from the French side of the border.

After Valls kicked off the year by winning a pre-season tournament in Barcelona last weekend, the first round of the LFAC will be held on the weekend of the 18th and 19th of April. The league will play 6 home-and-away rounds, with the grand final to be held on June 21st.

The LFAC thus joins a growing crowd of multi-national leagues in Europe - the DAFL having included both Swedish and Danish teams for a number of years and the Croatian-Austrian-Czech Championship also being able to lay claim to being a league across three nations.

After many years of struggle, France is finally ready to host its first national championship. The national league will take the form of a series of tournament rounds played in the different cities which are home to clubs, Montpellier having the honour to host the historic first round this weekend.

The four established clubs of Paris, Strasbourg, Bordeaux and Montpellier will compete in the first season, with the new clubs in Perpignan, Aix en Provence and Toulouse hoping to appear at the Coupe de France tournament to be held in Bordeaux in July.

Read on for a preview of the four teams involved in the inaugural national competition.

New Zealander Moss Doran, regularly mentioned in WFN articles such as this one, has this year stepped up in the footballing world and moved from country Victoria to the AFL Queensland, impressing in his first outing with his new club.

Doran, who represented the NZ Falcons at the last International Cup, has played the last few seasons for South Warrnambool in the strong Hampden League of country Victoria. This season he has done what many Kiwis have done before, and moved to Queensland!

However, it is not a life of lazing on the beaches that has drawn him there, but rather the chance to further develop his Australian football skills playing for Mt Gravatt Vultures in the very strong AFL Queensland competition.

To read about his latest exploits, see New Zealander Impresses.

Nauru, the tiny Pacific nation that made a fortune from bird guano and then ran out of the stuff sending the country near broke, has relaunched its domestic competition under a exciting new system. This is a country that came 5th in the 2008 International Cup, with most of the country AFL mad and looking for a long term solution to getting domestic footy happening again.

Unfortunately the Nauruans played the game on a village/tribal basis which created quite a violent contest at times, especially when you consider that the ovals lacked any great covering of grass. As a result it has been some years since the domestic competition has been played in a formal manner and given the nation’s excellent results at IC08 the place was cherry ripe for the game to reinvent itself.

Mike Pyke’s rapid journey to AFL footballer has seen the Sydney Swans elevate the big Canadian to the senior list last night. Evidently there is a dearth in Australia of big men with the ability to cover the ground quickly in the mould of Dean Cox. This has created the opening for Pyke and there has been much speculation as to whether he could possibly do the unthinkable and debut in this weekend’s Round 1.

It currently looks like that will not happen and he will be named as emergency for the Swans clash with St Kilda at Docklands Stadium on Saturday night. That still leaves the door ajar for him to complete his transition from playing rugby union in France last year to being at the elite level of the Australian game.

In the first article in this series, we mainly discussed with Malte Schudlich what AFL Germany would like to see from an AFL Europe body. Today we get opinions from the Danish Australian Football League's Ian Hill, the French Commission National de Football Australien's Marc Jund, and Aussie Rules Europe's Philip Porublev.

Aussie Rules Europe has announced that the 2009 EU Cup will be held on Saturday, October 3rd in the town of Samobor, just outside the Croatian capital Zagreb.

This will be the second edition of Europe's biggest 9-a-side representative tournament to be held in eastern Europe, after the 2008 cup was held in Prague.

The Croats were impressive on debut at the 2008 EU Cup and will be eager to take out the main prize in front of their home crowd this year. For their part, England's Dragonslayers will also be eager to defend their title.

Some new teams may be on the cards, with the Welsh and Andorran leagues hoping to make their debut after having a few seasons of domestic competition under their belts. Further east, players from Poland, Lithuania and Hungary helped fill out sides in last year's cup and organisers are hopeful of seeing one or more of those having a stand-alone side come October.

The AFL Queensland 2009 Under 18 State Championships have recently concluded, with two PNG players being selected in the state All-Star team.

Stanis Susuve from the Country Kookaburras and Peter Labi from the Suncoast Power have been included in a 21 man All-Star team chosen from the Championships. They will now join members of the Gold Coast squad in a special pre-season trial at Carrara at 11am on Saturday 28 March.

The match will be an opportunity for the championship standouts, who have not yet been involved in the Gold Coast training squad, to further their cause ahead of the upcoming season.

Late last year we posted the story AFL Europe proposed on a suggestion for the creation of AFL Europe and an associated true 18-a-side European Championships.

While the northern winter put footballs back in the cupboard until the snow melted, the concept of AFL Europe continued to be debated. Pinning down opinions on the record has been difficult, but the range of views has slowly become clearer.

In a series of articles we'll look at the shape the body may take and some of the views that have been expressed. At this stage it appears several of the larger European leagues are on side with the kind of proposal put forward by ARFLI and the AFL. Perhaps just as interesting is the more cautious view from one of Europe's middle leagues.

As reported in Gold Coast look the goods, only one major hurdle appeared to remain in the path of the Gold Coast Football Club being awarded the 17th AFL licence. That obstacle was that although the state Labor Government of Queensland had committed $60 million towards a rebuild of the Carrara stadium, the Liberal-National Party opposition would not commit.

Happily for the GC17 team, despite the LNP grabbing a small lead in opinion polls coming into the election, yesterday's vote appears to have delivered Labor a comfortable victory, albeit with a reduced margin. This should see the AFL quickly formally award the licence and the Gold Coast FC commence the next wave of off-field recruitment. The club begins in the primarily Victorian Under 18 competition this year, progressing to the VFL in 2010 and now look certain to debut in the AFL in 2011.

The AFL has also re-stated its intention to aim for a 2012 AFL debut for a western Sydney team. See Expansion plans on course.

In other news on the health of the AFL clubs, Port Adelaide recently put their hand out for assistance like that enjoyed by several Melbourne-based clubs. The AFL made it clear such help would not be forthcoming, saying they should negotiate a better stadium deal. However unlike the MCG and Docklands Stadium, Adelaide's AAMI Stadium is owned and operated by football. So unfortunately for football in South Australia, already struggling with crowds down at the Power, an aging main stadium, soccer on the rise and several SANFL clubs living on the edge, it appears the choice is between Port Adelaide and the local state league clubs. If the Power can't turn around their finances and the AFL don't come to the table, expect the SANFL clubs to be the ones that suffer. When the Crows formed, the league contracted from 10 to 9 clubs - perhaps we'll see that shrink again. So the great irony may be that SANFL fans will be barracking for arch enemy Port Adelaide in the hope they return to profit thus saving the need to strip cash from the local sides.