Tonight was the launch of the Cadbury AFL 9s Touch Football season. My team and I are playing tomorrow night, but I happened to pass another competition on a walk and stopped to watch some teams play this new hybrid of netball, touch football and AFL.
The teams I watched were all male (mixed teams also play) so it was interesting to watch men who had obviously played football from a young age have to adapt to drastically different rules. In particular:
- No tackling
- No smothering
- No shepherding
- No contact while marking
- No collecting the ball from the ground
- No kicking further than 33m
- No running further than 15m (even with a bounce)
- Only three players can kick goals
- Turnovers when the ball touches the ground
- Dispose of the ball after being touched
- No taking the ball from another player
That certainly looks like a lot of rules, so it was difficult for some to ignore (good) habits built over decades of playing full contact AFL.
For example, the habit of raising one’s hands with the ball before being tackled in AFL helps to shrug off an opponent and keep the hands free for disposing of the ball. In Touch AFL it is less useful as the touch warrants immediate disposal. Smothering a kick is a daring and skilful part of AFL. In touch, it usually results in giving a free kick to the team already in possession of the ball! Funnily enough, the Umpires are trained to AFL traditions as well, giving “a 50m penalty” (closer to 5m on a 100m long rectangular field!) and using vocabulary from AFL rather than the new sport.
I will be interested to see tomorrow how hard it is for my team and I to rid ourselves of AFL habits that don’t apply to AFL 9s, and how long it will take to learn new habits.