Aussie rules has turned us into nation of losers Luke Slattery
The Australian
January 06, 2011THE humbling of Australian cricket is merely a symptom of a wider sporting malaise.
Australia's international standing across a range of sports, from rugby league to athletics, is by our own high standards deteriorating while some sports - in singles tennis we have no men in the top 50 - are suffering long-term decline.
There is no need to search far and wide for the culprit or to carry out extensive audits of our recent sporting failures.
The enemy is within. It is Australian Rules football.
We must face a discomfiting reality: Aussie rules is killing Australian sport.
Consider some recent international results. This year, in rugby league, a code in which Australia was once almost invincible, the Kangaroos were soundly beaten by New Zealand in the tri-nations final. This blow, taken by itself, could be brushed aside as a bad day at the sporting office; a glitch. But the fact that it came just two years after NZ won the rugby league World Cup confirms a changing of the guard: Australia has lost the dominance it enjoyed in this code since the early 1970s. The Kangaroos have lost three of their last five finals.
In rugby union the Wallabies are ranked second behind the imperious All Blacks. The problem for the Wallabies, as they head into a World Cup year with the competition to be held across the Tasman, is that they run a distant second to the Blacks. Tiny NZ can now boast that in two traditional winter codes - league and union - they best Australia.
By taking a game off the Kiwis in the dead-rubber Bledisloe Cup match in Hong Kong this year, the Wallabies brought to an end a 10-match losing streak inflicted by their traditional trans-Tasman rivals and showed that, if anyone can beat the Kiwis in a World Cup final, they are a chance. But they must first make the final, and it is no certainty. In fact as the end-of-year tour to the northern hemisphere showed, our rugby internationals, like our cricketers, are fast turning into England's bunnies.
Britain's overall supremacy over Australia is amplified by the Olympic medal tally. In the 2008 summer games in Beijing Britain ejected Australia from the fourth place it had enjoyed in Sydney and Athens, relegating us to sixth place overall. And while this year's Commonwealth Games results suggest a more internationally competitive Australian side for the next summer games in London, next year, hometown advantage is likely to ensure another dominant British performance.
The pool was the one arena in which Australia could traditionally regard itself as an international power. It was our gold zone. But our swimming dominance, much like our prowess in tennis and, it must be said, cricket, is slipping away.
Just about the only team sport in which Australia excels is men's hockey.
Which brings me back to Australian rules. Our most dominant winter code boasts about 600,000 players and, at the elite level, 17 teams in a national competition. There are two key observations to make about AFL in the context of Australia's declining sporting fortunes. First, it is a provincial sport without a global presence; a black hole. Second, it attracts many of Australia's finest athletes; rare talents who would be well suited to sports in which Australia competes internationally. As things stand, perhaps our finest athletic talent is lost to the international stage.
To make this point in a more graphic way one need only take a low-ranking AFL side such as my own team, Richmond, and dismember it.
About five of Richmond's tallest and most athletic players would, if appropriately re-skilled, dominate the Wallaby lineout or - to use a case more pertinent to current national anxieties - bolster Australia's fast bowling stocks. They are all of Chris Tremlett-like proportions. There lies our next Glenn McGrath.
It has not always been so - remember Dermot Brereton? - but today's AFL player is conditioned in the style of a middle-distance runner. He carries less bulk than earlier generations, but has more stamina. Re-condition him for strength and speed and he could walk into any NRL side. But a much broader perspective is needed, for these athletes are talent lost to the Socceroos, which failed to advance beyond the group stage in South Africa, to the Olympic team (track, field and swimming) and to tennis.
Every player claimed by the AFL is a player lost to the international sporting arena. Time was when a benign climate and relative wealth allowed Australia to excel at a number of international sports while indulging its passion for the indigenous code. But those times are over.
The problem is not just that the Brits and the Kiwis have vaulted beyond us in a few key sports; it's that our presence at the apex of the international sporting stage is suffering a broad decline. If we want to regain our place on that stage we can. But Australia is a small country by world standards and it is most unlikely we can achieve this aim without the participation of our best athletes, all of them.
With the exception of the US, none of our competitors in the sports that matter to us bleed perhaps their best and bravest sportsmen to an internationally irrelevant code. In the world of international competition the AFL is killing us.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/aussie-rules-has-turned-us-into-nation-of-losers/story-e6frg6zo-1225982616233---------------------------------------------------------------
I think we know who the loser is Mr Slattery
