AFL needs to lose parochial roots Tom Perkin
Herald Sun
December 27, 2010THE AFL has shown that it's very serious about pushing the game into overseas countries.
We've seen the recent exhibition game in China, clinics in South Africa, and there's always conversation about taking the game to New Zealand and other countries in the Pacific area.
With all this in mind, should the AFL now consider changing the game's name - in other words, ditching "AFL"?
While we've grown up with, and accept, that the game we love is called Australian rules football, this is perhaps the most parochial name of any sport anywhere in the world. Does a parochial name hinder the game's development overseas?
I can't think of another country's game that has a name as exclusive as ours. American football, for example, can be called gridiron, and teams compete in the NFL, not the American Football League.
There's the world game, football or soccer -- names that tie the sport to no particular nation. There's cricket and baseball, golf and tennis, and rugby league and rugby union.
But here we play "Australian" football and we ask the world to embrace "Australian" football.
We have labelled the game as if we alone own it and then we ask other nations to embrace it as if it were their own.
Would we embrace cricket if it was called England rules? How about golf if it was called Scotball?
And don't answer that question through 2010 eyes. Answer it while trying to put yourself back in time to when those games were attempting to establish roots in Australia.
Taking Australian out of our name and finding a replacement is perhaps not as radical as it sounds. Let's not forget that the name of our game was changed from VFL to AFL in 1990 to incorporate the whole of Australia.
The same logic is behind this new name change, except that this time we want to embrace and incorporate the rest of the world.
The Melbourne-Brisbane game played recently in Beijing attracted a crowd of 7100. It's impossible to say whether this is a good or bad figure.
The AFL claimed it as a positive but then it was still well below the lowest attendance for the 2010 season -- 8848 in Darwin, when Melbourne played Port Adelaide.
Whether the AFL viewed the Beijing experiment as being successful or not, it will probably push on with its desire to expand the game in the belief international acceptance brings with it a whole new range of potential sponsors, via a bigger viewing audience.
But you still have to wonder if international acceptance wouldn't be easier and quicker if the game had a more generic name.
But what?
Well, a man named Tom Wills supposedly started the game. Some believe he saw a game that indigenous Australians were playing and then manipulated it. The game the indigenous Australians were playing was called Marn Grook, or game ball.
There's no reason our game couldn't call itself Marn Grook, or game ball, or maybe even Willsball. It would certainly seem odd at first, but in time, we'd grow to accept it. If we struggle, our kids certainly won't.
There are other options. Pacific Football League, or the PFL, might help encourage Kiwis and others in the area to at the very least give the game a chance.
It also overcomes any problems the AFL may eventually encounter should New Zealand ever embrace the game and pursue the chance of having a team in our competition.
You can hardly call it the "AFL" if the flag gets won by the New Zealand Rams.
Personally, I couldn't care less about a name change, just like I couldn't care less about pushing our game into other countries. I love it just the way it is.
Whether I'm playing Aussie rules or Marn Grook isn't going to matter much to me, but it might just matter to some kid in China who's as proudly parochial as I am.
Tom Perkin is a year 10 student at St Bede's College in Mentonehttp://www.heraldsun.com.au/opinion/afl-needs-to-lose-parochial-roots/story-e6frfhqf-1225976478313
