FanHouse

A few of you may recall that I wrote about International Rules Football for the FanHouse last October. (Here's what I wrote, in case you missed it.) This form of football is a hybrid of Australian football and the Irish sport of Gaelic Football, which has been a national obsession of Ireland for more than a century now.

On its own, International Rules is an intriguing code of football, but in recent years, it's mostly been an excuse for Aussies and Irishmen to beat the living tar out of each other...


Yes, that's Barry Hall's bald dome in the blue #1 jersey for Australia. He was right in the middle of things in Dublin's Croke Park, where the on-field violence got so bad -- Gaelic footy star Graham Geraghty had to be braced carted off the field -- that the Gaelic Athletic Association abandoned the series for 2007 and suggested it might never return.

Ah, but football means never saying never. It turns out that the GAA has scheduled a July meeting with the AFL to discuss the future of the International Rules series. Turns out that the Gaelic footballers were polled and decided that they wanted the series to continue. Now both sides are suggesting that the series still has value and should be restarted next year.

If it does get restarted, perhaps the AFL should leave Brendan Fevola back in Carlton...