Following news that two of NZ's top footy juniors have been training with an AFL junior programme, the world's most libertarian sport now comes to South Auckland -- this weekend New Zealand's top Australian footballers show off their skills in a weekend NPC. Auckland, Wellington, Canterbury and Waikato (preview here) play off in a round robin which starts Saturday morning, and finishes 2:30 Sunday with Auckland v Wellington, before a NZ team is chosen for the Australian Country Championshions in July. Says World Footy News:New Zealand enjoyed considerable Australian footballing success in 2005. Besides winning the International Cup [in an MCG final], the Pacific nation was invited to compete in the Australian Country Championships and thousands of junior participants were exposed to the sport. This February, Auckland hosts New Zealand's premier domestic football tournament - the National Provincial Championships - which will determine the nation's best senior league.Aussie Rules footie is a sport best seen live, so if you want to see the highest standard of live footie available in NZ, get down to the ground this weekend. And now you know where I'll be spending a lot of my weekend, feel free to join me in a VB on the sidelines.
What: New Zealand's Australian Football NPC tournament
Where: Mountfort Park, Manurewa. Map here.
When: This Saturday and Sunday. Fixture list here.
LINKS: NPC Fixture list - NZAFL
NPC to showcase NZ's footballing talent - World Footy News
National Championships preview - NZAFL
AFL's Talent Manager commits to international youth development - World Footy News
2 comments:
AFL is the greatest sport (and most libertarian sport) on the planet. The rule book is 16 pages long and is double spaced.
The rule book for rugby on the other hand is 480 pages long.
Having spent much of my life in Melbourne I honestly believe that if they put AFL on the TV more regularly that Kiwis would really get into it.
"AFL is the greatest sport (and most libertarian sport) on the planet. The rule book is 16 pages long and is double spaced.
The rule book for rugby on the other hand is 480 pages long."
Exactly right. AFL is the libertarian sport. "Aussie Rules' rules are actually quite simple - as they need to be for Australians to follow them - and are designed around three basic principles: to keep the game going, to protect the guy going for the ball, and to stop anyone initiating force against anyone else (while anybody's looking)."
Can't get more libertarian that that, really. As I said here. :-)
As someone observed once while talking on the same subject (oh look, it was me too, in that same article), "the Ten Commandments were supposedly written on one piece of stone, the US Constitution on ten pages of parchment, but European Union regulations on bananas are smeared across four volumes - and no one, not even the bureaucrats - and especially not the banana growers - can understand them."
(And have I said, 'Go the Catters' for a while?) ;^)
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