World Footy News

The Louisville Kings Footy Club website appears to be breaking the news (although rumours have strongly suggested it would be the case) that the 2007 Nationals will be held in Louisville, Kentucky (note that their website has since gone down).  This will be the 11th staging of the event, in the 10th year of the USAFL.  It will no doubt be promoted as a celebration of that milestone with a return to the original location of the first game of footy played in the US between Louisville and Cincinnati back in 1996.

Aussie Rules or International Rules?  That has been the question some Australian Football fans have been asking since the re-birth of the hybrid game several years ago.  Arguments are made for and against the concept, with some seeing International Rules as a vehicle for promoting Aussie Rules amongst younger Australians who want to see international competition and also as a tool for growing awareness in the footy community of international possibilities for our game.  Others condemn it as barely a hybrid and more a slightly modified version of Gaelic football and question whether the AFL will not back Australian Football and forsee a future of International Rules only.  Of course most people hold a view somewhere in between these extremes, or haven't given it much thought at all.  Recently David Matthews, the AFL's General Manager of National and International Game Development, gave his views on what role International Rules may have long term and whether that clashes with dreams of Australian Football going global.

After all the media hype over the past year, Bachar Houli last night got the chance to let his football talents do the talking. The young Bomber was named to play in the evening’s NAB cup match against Carlton, held at Melbourne’s Telstra Dome. This level of match is arguably inferior only to a Premiership match (at least standard-wise), and depending on how the coaching staff rated his performance, it may help determine if and when he sees his first match for points.

Apologies for the broadly directed post, but a short message is in order to advise that when new users attempt to sign up for accounts they are competing for our attention against many "spambot" automatically generated account requests from spammers.  Because of this issue there is a risk that a genuine application will be rejected accidentally, as happened today.  If you sign up for an account and do not receive your password for several days then you may wish to try again.

AFL PNG has appointed Peter Cates from Adelaide, as the new national operations manager. This appointment will certainly strengthen efforts and programmes already in place with junior development to develop a locally sourced PNG player to the AFL. 

The next major step in South Africa's rapidly unfolding football journey may well be led by the AFL clubs themselves. After the developmental South African youth team played their final tour match, in Perth last week, the AFL held a dinner at which they unveiled plans for powerhouse clubs West Coast, Fremantle and Collingwood to become heavily involved with fast-tracking the game in South Africa.

Just a quick note to let fans know that the Australian Rules Football League Ireland and British Australian Rules Football League websites are back up and running after extended downtime during the off-season.

 

The GAA may have put the International Rules series into deep freeze, but former GAA stars in the AFL are running hot in pre-season training. We have a look at the form of the O'hAilpin brothers (and point you to a great documentary on the family), and draw attention to several recent media reports on the other members of the Irish invasion.

We recently reported on the first two matches of South Africa’s developmental squad played against the QANTAS Kickstart Indigenous Youth Team in Jabiru and Darwin. Here we present a more in-depth look at those games, including photos, and a wrap up of the third and final match.

Footy in China is continuing to be developed in several locations, with Tom Mattessi filling an AYAD position in Tianjin, near Beijing, having good success getting locals involved in the sport. A big difficulty must be that most Chinese would never had heard of Aussie Rules. Encouragingly Mattessi has made some inroads there, with a local television station running a good piece on his program.

2007 marks the 10th anniversary of USFooty. Originally construed as the United States Australian Football Association it was later renamed the United States Australian Football League and given the appellation USFooty. This article looks at some of the people who have made footy in the US what it is today.