World Footy News

Scot Palmer, prominent football writer for Melbourne's Sunday Herald-Sun, published a short article this week on the performance of Carlton's O'hAilpin brothers, whom he believes may be on course for senior list promotions next season.

Powerhouse AFL club Collingwood is preparing to turn around their poor on-field performance in 2005 with a post-season training camp - possibly to be held in Arizona.

Australian Football League clubs Sydney and the Kangaroos will take professional Australian rules to the US when they clash in Los Angeles in January.

As reported earlier Australian cable TV network FOXTEL will show the 2005 International Cup Grand Final, between New Zealand and Papua New Guinea, on their FOXFooty Channel. Details are below.

The United States Revolution went home brimming with confidence after completing the double against the 2002 International Cup champions Ireland and finishing third in the tournament.

The Samoan Bulldogs overcame inaccurate kicking and a committed Great Britain Bulldogs outfit to finish the tournament on a high note and secure fifth place in their final match of the 2005 International Cup (on August 13th).

In their final seeding match of the 2005 International Cup, at Optus Oval last Saturday 13th August, the Samurai were finally able to get their running game going to find space and use precision passing to cut a swathe through the embattled Spanish side.

World Footy News hopes you've enjoyed our coverage of the 2005 Australian Football International Cup. What we have provided would not have been possible without the assistance of many people from around the world. We would like to encourage all our readers to visit the primary websites of the other countries involved in the Cup. The sites will vary in coverage depth, depending on the resources available to them, e.g. Ireland's prime mover is in fact a player, so he obviously had his hands full during the tournament and had more to worry about than a website. Here we list all country sites of the participating nations. And visit our Links section for other countries too.

Team Canada broke their 2005 International Cup drought with a comfortable win over the much improved South Africans, although not without a scare in the third quarter. This was despite resting some of their better players such as gutsy midfielder Jason Robinson to give everyone a fair run in the series.

The following are the official AFL scores, best players and goalkickers for the final round of matches at the 2005 International Cup. Also listed are the final rankings for each country. Later we'll do an indepth analysis of how the countries have gone compared with 2002 and look at where the tournament may go in future.

New Zealand held off Papua New Guinea to win the 2005 Australian Football International Cup this evening, running out 7.8.50 to 5.2.32 winners.

With a crowd of international footy diehards and earlybirds starting to filter in for the Carlton-Collingwood match, New Zealand and PNG lined up with their respective war dances, then hit the ground with some very tough, physical football in the first ten minutes.

New Zealand kept the ball in their forward line for most of the start of the match, but pressure from PNG left the Falcons unable to get clean posessions and the Mozzies eventually broke through for the first goal of the game when after a quick break down the ground Dominic Livuana received a handpass out of the pack in close and converted.

News in today is that pay TV station FOXFooty will record tonight's International Cup Grand Final between New Zealand and Papua New Guinea, and it will air in Australia in the coming weeks. This also means the footage should be available to the wider footy community, possibly on DVD or the AFL website, in future.