Well that's a bit unexpected

[bluegargantua]

Hey,

Thanks to Xbox Live and ESPN, I can stream sporting events to my screen on-demand. I was doing English Premiere League Soccer, but apparently they wanted money out of the deal (or perhaps the season ended?) so that's dried up. Most of the major sports aren't on-demand so I get to see lots of lesser-known sports.

And I've discovered I'm really enjoying Australian Rules Football.

The short version is that Australian Football is a cross between Rugby and Soccer with thin elements of American football and basketball thrown in. The game moves fast, is relatively high scoring, and while bad games have a "kill the man with the ball" scramble about them, good games chain together a string of passes and kicks to end in a winning goal.

It's also helped crystallize what I do enjoy about American Football as a game. Australian Football (and basketball and soccer) are in near-constant motion. American football is broken up into discrete moments of play (each "down"). So in American football, you decide on and execute a play for that down and each down builds into a long-term strategies. If you're known to have a good receiver, maybe you can get the opponents so focused on stopping him that your runners can carry the ball, that sort of thing. In constant motion games things are much more tactical and it's harder to build out long-term plans -- or perhaps it would be better to say that it's much harder to see and appreciate those things.

Anyway, it's an interesting little sport
Tom

Comments

[mangosteen]

Aussie Rules is remarkably awesome... I've been watching it on and off for pretty much as long as ESPN has been broadcasting it (think decades).

I've always thought of it as "A bunch of Australians who wanted to play Rugby, but only had a cricket pitch lying around."