Australian Sport
Aussie Rules
The most popular sport in Australia isn’t soccer, rugby, or even cricket, it’s Australian Rules Football, or “Aussie Rules”.
Teacher Hayden from Adelaide in Australia says, “Aussie rules is a crazy sport that looks like rugby, mixed with soccer, mixed with basketball, played on a cricket field!”
It’s a high contact sport with lots of tackling, played with an oval ball which looks like an American football or rugby ball. Points are scored by kicking goals between or behind the main goal posts; 6-points for between, 1-point for behind, and 1-point for hitting the post.
Hayden’s favourite Aussie Rules team is Essendon and he has watched them lose on many occasions. They play in the main competiton for Aussie Rules, called the AFL (Australian Football League). The Grand Final is played at the MCG (Melbourne Cricket Ground) every year and has the biggest crowd of any championship final game in the world! (Over 100,000 people.)
There are 18 players on each team and the attacking side runs with the ball like rugby, but players have to bounce the ball every so often like basketball.
Teacher Cameron, from Brisbane Australia, supports the Brisbane Lions Aussie Rules team, who finished last place in 2017. He says the most interesting thing about Aussie Rules is that “the Umpire can't send you off for dangerous play!” there is also no offside in Aussie rules, so the game looks very messy to people who don’t know the rules.
Teacher Hayden from Adelaide in Australia says, “Aussie rules is a crazy sport that looks like rugby, mixed with soccer, mixed with basketball, played on a cricket field!”
It’s a high contact sport with lots of tackling, played with an oval ball which looks like an American football or rugby ball. Points are scored by kicking goals between or behind the main goal posts; 6-points for between, 1-point for behind, and 1-point for hitting the post.
Hayden’s favourite Aussie Rules team is Essendon and he has watched them lose on many occasions. They play in the main competiton for Aussie Rules, called the AFL (Australian Football League). The Grand Final is played at the MCG (Melbourne Cricket Ground) every year and has the biggest crowd of any championship final game in the world! (Over 100,000 people.)
There are 18 players on each team and the attacking side runs with the ball like rugby, but players have to bounce the ball every so often like basketball.
Teacher Cameron, from Brisbane Australia, supports the Brisbane Lions Aussie Rules team, who finished last place in 2017. He says the most interesting thing about Aussie Rules is that “the Umpire can't send you off for dangerous play!” there is also no offside in Aussie rules, so the game looks very messy to people who don’t know the rules.
Rugby League
The second-most popular sport in Australia is a type of rugby, called rugby league.
Rugby union is the type of rugby most popular in Japan and around the world, played with fifteen players on each team; rugby league has thriteen players on each team.
In a rugby league game, play stops and resets after every tackle. This means rugby league has harder, more aggressive one-on-one tackling than rugby union.
After the attacking team is tackled six times, they must hand over the ball to the other team, so play usually goes for 5 tackles, with the attacking team kicking before the sixth tackle.
The main competition for rugby league in Australia is the NRL (National Rugby League), with sixteen teams; fifteen from Australia and one from New Zealand, the Auckland Warriors.
Rugby union is the type of rugby most popular in Japan and around the world, played with fifteen players on each team; rugby league has thriteen players on each team.
In a rugby league game, play stops and resets after every tackle. This means rugby league has harder, more aggressive one-on-one tackling than rugby union.
After the attacking team is tackled six times, they must hand over the ball to the other team, so play usually goes for 5 tackles, with the attacking team kicking before the sixth tackle.
The main competition for rugby league in Australia is the NRL (National Rugby League), with sixteen teams; fifteen from Australia and one from New Zealand, the Auckland Warriors.
Cricket
Cricket is the honorary national sport of Australia. It is a bat and ball sport, somewhat similar to baseball, but with 11 people on each side and many, many, many rules.
Cricket can be very difficult for people to understand, but it is a fun summer sport to play.
Surprisingly, cricket is the second-most popular sport in the world, behind soccer, and in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, the Australian Cricket Team were the strongest team in the world.
Australia has had many great cricket players, including Shane Warne, David Boon, and the greatest player of all-time, Don Bradman.
There are three kinds of cricket; a new type of cricket, called T20 Cricket, where games last a few hours, One Day International Cricket (ODI), where a game goes for a whole day, and Test Cricket, the most traditional form of cricket. One game of test match cricket goes for up to 5 days!
You can try cricket at British Hills in one of our sports classes, but don’t worry – each lesson is only 90-minutes long, so you don’t have to play for 5 days!
