Australians love their sport. The mainstream sports here are very different from ours in the United States. There’s cricket instead of baseball, Australian Rules Football instead of our gridiron version of NFL and Netball in place of women’s Basketball. Rugby is another sport they love but we rarely play. They also have their own version of Nascar in V8 Supercars.
Although many Aussie’s can’t believe it, my favorite new sport is Cricket. There are many different forms of the game, but in all versions, players “bowl” a ball similar to a baseball towards the batsman who tries to hit it with a flat cricket bat. The field is circular with the pitch in the middle; if the ball is hit, ten or so players try to catch it barehanded for an out. A bowler can also make an out by bowling the ball past a batsman and hitting the wicket. Traditional Test cricket matches last 3 to 5 days so if you don’t like baseball you won’t like this slow game. They even break for tea throughout the day. One-day international matches last one day with 50 overs per team. (An over is 6 bowls from one bowler). Twenty20 matches are the fastest and most exciting form of the game. Personally, I think the US should get involved in the sport; we could be pretty good with all the baseball background.
There’s Rugby League and Rugby Union, but I can’t tell the difference between the two. To me they are both Rugby and honestly I don’t care for either league.
For Australian Rules Football, twenty or so players per team throw and kick a large soft football around a really big field. Players try to kick the ball though extra large field goal posts to score either one or six points. It’s really growing on me. They call this “footy.”
Although Australians don’t play many American sports they follow them quite regularly. There are currently many NBA and NCAA basketball games on every week. There is advertising for MLB in a few weeks, and I saw a few NFL games including the Super Bowl when we first arrived in Australia.
Golf and Tennis are pretty popular; they focus on the Australians near the top of the men’s or women’s tours.
The Olympics were pretty fun to watch, but with a different perspective because they followed the Australian athletes and their stories.
One last difference is in the name, Sport. This refers to any single sport or the plural form of them. We would say sports they say sport.
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