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If you aren’t from Down Under you may have heard of something called AFL, but aren’t sure what it is. The acronym stands for the Australian Football League, but understand that it isn’t the same kind of football that some refer to as soccer! Australian rules football is the country’s most popular spectator sport and is among the toughest, fast-paced, and most exciting games in the world, played by some of the planet’s top athletes!
On average this uniquely Australian team sport draws crowds of over 40,000 for every high-level game, and AFL tickets are eagerly sought after by its legions of dedicated fans! If you happen to be in Australia and love hard-hitting tactical sports, then, by all means, get a ticket and see for yourself what makes this Indigenous Aussie game so great!
Australian Football, also known as Aussie Rules, or just ‘Footy’ has been played for over 150 years, getting its start in Melbourne in the mid-nineteenth century. The Aboriginal game Marngrook and the Gaelic style football played in Ireland are both thought to have provided inspiration, along with the football played in England at the time, where many young Australians were sent to attend university. When they returned home they brought their passion for rough and tumble sports with them! The Australian Football of today is played between two teams of eighteen players with an oval ball on a large oval-shaped field. The aim of the game is to kick the ball through the goalposts at either end of the ground.
At first, the Aussie Football games didn’t have a real set of official rules, so the rather chaotic action sometimes halted for lengthy negotiations over how play should proceed before it could begin again. It soon became apparent that a set of formal rules was badly needed, so in May of 1859, renowned cricketer and proponent of the new game Thomas Wentworth Wills along with seven members of the Melbourne Cricket Club established the first set of official rules:
- Players can handle the ball at any time
- The player handling the ball can only run as far as necessary to kick the ball
- A player who caught, or ‘marked’ the ball cleanly from a kick can take a free kick
- Throwing the ball is banned
- An opponent cannot be held if he doesn’t have possession of the ball
Over the following decade, some amendments were added:
- Players can run with the ball if they bounce it or touch it on the ground every five or six yards
- The ball has to be kicked through the goal instead of being carried through like in rugby
- Players are penalised if they hold the ball when tackled
Following the 1880s Australian Rules football spread from Melbourne across Victoria, then west to South Australia and Western Australia, and finally south to the island of Tasmania. The Australian Football League, or AFL for short we know today was formed in the year 1990 and is now played all across the nation to the joy of millions of eager fans!
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