Your Thoughts Exactly

The Sox are down 7-0 to the D-Rays, as Derek Lowe continues to tank in his walk year. If he keeps this up there is no way we resign him, and to be honest, we should probably try and trade him.

KG stepped up like I told him to. He must of read my ramblings before the game. Yo KG don't feel afraid to leave a comment next time you're around. My predcition of Minnesota covering was wrong but of course, I don't care since I didn't make it down to the TAB down the street to throw a bet on them. I did throw some money down on New Jersey +5.5. We'll see how that goes

Sports and Gambling are big in Australia. Unfortunately the sports they follow are not MLB, NBA, or NFL, meaning I've had to rely on the Internet, MLB audio, and 24 hour sports bars where I can watch the occasional NBA playoff game at 10 AM. For being 14000 miles and 10 time zones away from home, I can stay remarkably plugged in.

But it aint good enough. No live sports events, and no primetime sports games or Sportscenter. So I've turned to Australian Sports to try and fill the void. Australian Sports are based around following any Australian who does well at any sport at all, such as the 20K walk or short-track cycling. This is the most annoying aspect of Austalian sports highlight shows, that I get to see 5 minute features on a Modern Penthelete hoping to qualify for Athens 2004 and not one highlight of the NBA playoffs (my favorite sporting event.) Australians are traditionally good at some more mainstream Olympic sports, such as swimming and tennis. Australian tv also does a much better job of following European League Soccer and International Soccer in general, which is fantastic. Soccer has quickly become my fourth favorite sport and the EPL my 4th favorite league (and could soon pass MLB.) I am pumped for Euro 2004, which everyone should watch. Australia also has their own basketball and soccer league, both of which I refuse to watch since they just remind me I could be watching games of better quality.

Bases Loaded against the D rays, and we cant score. Anyways, the three big sports of Australia are Cricket, Rugby, and Footy, a.k. AFL, a.k.a Australian Rules Football. Cricket, in case you didn't know is, slower baseball: the teams break for tea and lunch, test matches take 5 days to complete, and batters can bat for hours at a time. Still it would be fun to go to one of these games with a grill and about 30 beers, and I plan to do so. Australia has the best cricket team in the world: they won the Cricket World Cup in 2003. I secrectly root for Team West Indies however, since they are closer to home, and I got introduced to cricket by a family friend in Trinidad fice years ago.

Australia also probably has the best Rugby team in the world. Unfortunately, Australians can't tell me they do because they lost to England in the final of the World Cup in overtime. One of my favorite pastimes is to ask Aussies who the best rugby team in the world is. The pained expressions on their face as they mutter the phrase "the bloody Poms," are pricless. If they were smart, theyd ask me who won the American League last year.

There are two major forms of Rugby in Australia; Rugby League and Rugby Union. The rules are different, and Union involves teams from South Africa, New Zealand, and Australia. League is the true Australia product, and is based in Sydney, which has 8 teams from the city and suburbs in the league. Rugby is interesting to watch, but not really fun. There is occasional violence, but the play stops too much, and is based even more on field position then the NFL. A team can easily drive down to within ten meteres, and then run play after play in an attempt to get in for a "try", without being successful. To put it in perspective, it would be like if an NFL team had the ball on the one, but then kept running plays where the QB pitched it out wide to a running back on a sweep, except the back starts on the ten yard line and has no lead blockers. As you might think, it doesnt work too often. Rugby will occasionally give the exciting play, and I'll watch it to get a sports fix, but it isn't a game the U.S. needs.

AFL on the other hand, is awesome. Unfortunately, where as Rugby's mecca is Sydney, Footy is based in Melbourne, which hosts about 8 of the 14 teams in the AFL. In fact there were no teams outside Victoria (the small state in the southeast part of the country) until the 1980s. Sydney now has one team, the Swans, and the sport has also expanded to Brisbane and the West Coast.

I went to an AFL game in Melbourne in the Telstra Dome, one of the new stadia built to house footy. It was a state of the art retractable dome, and I saw a game between Essendon and Western Bulldogs, two Melbourne suburbs. For a live sporting event, I give the AFL props. The fans were into it, especially a 50 year old mother in front of me who was swearing at the ref the whole time. The food services werent the greatest compared to new U.S. stadiums, but they did the job. For a plus, however, the stadium had a sports tab inside, meaning you can bet on the game (or anything) from the stadium. Fantastic

Footy itself is chaos on the field. Its basically Soccer but you can use your hands. You can run with the ball, but you have to bounce it every 5 steps or so. You can pass it to someone, but you have to underhand punch the ball, rather than pass or lateral. You can kick the footy to someone, the main method of passing, and if you catch it on the fly, you get a mark, meaning you can't be tackled until you pass the point where you caught it, so if you are close enough to the goal, you can step back and attempt to kick it through the goals. There are two sets of poles; kicking it through the interior ones is a goal, worth 6 points, the outer ones a behind, worth 1 point.

The fields are huge, like two or three football fields. This leads to: a huge amount of players on the field and, coaches and water boys running on the field during the action to shout instructions to players and provide refreshments. Also, when a ball goes out of bounds, the linesmen takes the footy, faces the crowd, and throws the ball over his head as high as possible. Its hilarious. The game is up and down with the action of basketball, and has similar scores to basketball as well, I think the game I went to was 105-88 or something like that. Its a game of momentum; teams routinely score three of four straight goals, or dominate a quarter. There is also a fair amount of violence, as loose balls lead to guys pummeling each other, and you are allowed to use an opponent as a boost to jump and catch the ball. There were two or three solid "Holy Shit," replay worthy hits at the game I was at, about the same level as NFL. Check out a game if you can, they show them in the States on Fox Sports World.

So that's my dissertation on Australia Sports. They'll be more for sure; There the big State of Origin series in Rugby League this week. And the best part about this article? Its now 7-6 D Rays. Got to love playing Tampa Bay