FOOTY!

It’s Saturday the 25^th of July and I’m going to my first ever Australian Rules Football Match! The sport of footy is near and dear to the hearts of Melbourne’s inhabitants. No other city in Australia celebrates the game as much as them. Each neighborhood has its own team and fierce rivalries are fought to decide which neighborhood will rein supreme. However, they all happen to have completely ridiculous fight songs. Just to give you a taste, take the team we were rooting for, St. Kilda. Can you guess how their fight song goes? Well if you guessed a defunct version of When The Saints Go Marching In except with “Oh how I want to be in that number” switched to “Oh how I want to be in St. Kilda” then you would be spot on. But enough about heir musical inaptitude; this is a sporting event, not a orchestral production, and thankfully the action on the pitch that follows the musical introductions more than makes up for their inadequacy.

Allow me to attempt to explain the game in a concise manner:

Start with an oval pitch a little bigger than an American Football field and place 4 tall white poles at both ends. The middle two poles of each set should be about 50% taller than the outside poles, this delineates the two types of point scoring opportunities. 6 points for a ball punted through the inner poles and 1 for a ball through the outer set. Game play rarely stops except when a major pile-up has stalled movement of the ball. Passing can be done in the form of a tossed lateral, a punched forward ball, or a punted ball. If a player catches a punted ball, no matter whose foot it came off of, this is called a mark. The player then has the option to stop and set up his next move, or continue play and forfeit this privilege. Until the player forfeits his ability set up a shot/pass by running several meters away from the point where he caught the mark, the opposing team cannot interfere with his set shot/pass.

How many people have I completely lost by now? Well the game lasts for four 20-minute quarters and ending scores generally fall into the 50 – 150 range. Simple enough right! Well you get the hang of it pretty quickly when you watch it being played. I’m a fan. I think I’ll have to get some games going back on campus when I return. Oh, and one more thing; one of the famous architects we met, Sean Godsell, used to play professional footy for St. Kilda! How cool is that! Oh . . . I sure do like this place.