ESL: Sports: How To Play Australian Football

It's got running. It's got kicking. It's got bone-on-bone hits without pads. No, it's not rugby. It's Australian football, although you might hear it called 'Aussie Rules' or even 'footy'. This is Australia's biggest sport, and it's now played professionally by 18 teams in the AFL. It has the fourth highest average attendance of any domestic sports league in the world. These are some serious fans. What do you say we talk basics? Aussie Rules is played on a football field probably bigger than any you've ever seen, with an egg-shaped ball that takes some crazy bounces. Each team consists of eighteen players on the field and four on the bench. Tremendous athletes, these players are basketball-sized with the hand and foot-speed of an NFL wide receiver, and stamina greater than a soccer player. The game starts with a centre bounce, a bit like a basketball Jump Ball. The basic object of the game, like American football, is to move the ball down the field and score. You can move the ball three ways: (1) Running, but you have to bounce it every sixteen yards. (15 metres) (2) Using your fist to hit it forward. This is called a 'handball', another skill you need to Aussie Rules. (3) And, of course, the most common way is kicking it. Like a quarterback using feet instead of hands, these guys can hit a teammate on the run at fifty yards. (46 metres) If the kick is a little high, a player may have to jump and make a spectacular catch. This is called a 'mark'. And believe it or not, you can use the opponent as a springboard for jumping. If you take a mark, you can keep going, or you can stop on the spot and take an unimpeded kick. Once in scoring position the idea is to kick the ball through the two large upright posts. That's a goal, and worth six points. If you hit the post, or send it between the big post and the outer, lower post, it's worth one point and is called a 'behind'. A final scoreline might look something like this. By the way: there's no offside rule. Don't get us wrong: there are positions. Defenders defend. Forwards go forward. And midfielders... yep! Play in midfield. Players come in all shapes and sizes. The Freemantle Dockers have five-foot-eight (5' 8") Hayden Ballentyne, six-foot-three (6' 3") Nate Fyfe, and seven-footer (7') Aaron Sandilands. You can tackle hard, but not too high or low. It has to be between the shoulders and the knees. There are four quarters of twenty minutes but like soccer, time is added on for stoppages of play. The extra time can be as much as ten additional minutes. AFL teams play twenty-two regular season games. The top eight teams make the play-offs or, as they're called in Australia, the 'Finals'. Eventually two teams meet in the championship game, or the 'Grand Final'. It's Australia's Superbowl and is played every year in the magnificent Melbourne Cricket Ground in front of ninety thousand plus. (90,000+) It's a big deal! Any questions, check us out at afl.com.au and on Twitter @afl