Two years ago I visited the Styrian Downunder Dogs in the town of Bad Radkersburg on the border with Slovenia where they were conducting a Friday night to Sunday pre-season camp.

It impressed me that the team was taking such a serious approach to their football and eager to absorb as much knowledge as possible about the game. These Austrians have to take the football seriously because without a Vienna team they represent Austria and travel long distances (even by Australian standards) to play in the Croatian league.

So, what has changed?

Maybe it’s fate, karma, coincidence. Or maybe it’s just two excellent teams dominating for the last two years, but the Toulouse Hawks and Paris Cockerels get the chance to lock horns in the CNFA grand final in France for the second consecutive year. Or, more correctly, the first. The 2012/13 grand final was never played after the Montpellier venue could not be used due to a local authority’s decision.

When Paris could not get to the rescheduled and relocated event, the premiership was handed to the Toulouse Hawks for their maiden flag. Even though the two met later in the year in the French Cup (for a Toulouse win), it still wasn’t the grand final they deserved to play. But the 2013/4 season sees them both back in the grand final for another chance.

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.

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.”

Last year, World Footy News ran the article Anatomy of a new club – Denmark’s Odense Lions on the emergence of a new Australian Rules football team in the Danish city Odense. Last weekend the Lions took to the field in their first official hit-out in the DAFL. The following information comes from the crew at Odense in an interview that looks again at their origins, their first game and what follows.

“Australian Rules football in Denmark, and the Swedish region Skåne, is played in the league called DAFL. It is fantastic for everyone involved with the club that we already are a part of DAFL with it being just a year and a half since the club was founded.

"Odense Lions is the new team in the league this year and everyone did not expect much for a team with more than half of it being players completely new to the sport. Having recruited and trained during the long Danish winter, The Lions were filled with excitement about the first real game for many players and the first game in DAFL as Lions for everyone.”

In one of the closest seasons in recent years, the CNFA home and away season concluded on the weekend with a fight to the wire for finals places. As mentioned in a previous article, the Cergy-Pontoise Coyotes, Montpellier Firesharks and Paris Cockerels would all have to fight for their place in the final round.

The unlucky team was the Firesharks who went down by just two points to the Cockerels in a heartbreaking loss. Whilst the Coyotes also lost to Toulouse in the final round, their for and against percentage was marginally better than the Firesharks, giving them fourth place.

Firesharks fans will now lament what might have been, but their season was a credit to them as they remained consistent throughout and were desperately unlucky to miss finals action. Similarly, the Strasbourg Kangaroos and ALFA Lions can plan for next season after long seasons which saw some successes and improvements towards a new year.

The results set up a fascinating round of semi-finals on May 24th. Toulouse Hawks will take on the Cergy-Pontoise Coyotes in the first of the semi-finals between 1st place and 4th place, whilst in the battle between the 2nd and 3rd finishers the Bordeaux Bombers will take on the Paris Cockerels.

The semi finalist will meet in the grand-final to be played on the 14th of June.