Posted on 05/27/2016 12:33:32 AM PDT by Berlin_Freeper
Australia's players looked relaxed during training at the Stadium of Light on Thursday as they prepared to put a spanner in the works of England's Euro 2016 preparations.
The Socceroos are in Sunderland ahead of Friday night's friendly clash with Roy Hodgson's men, a game in which all of the focus is on the home side.
But while Three Lions boss Hodgson finalises his plans for France this summer, Australia are aiming to go under the radar and claim what would undeniably be a surprise victory.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
What????
Hodgson keen to finalise his group before the friendly with Portugal next Thursday.
On their last visit to the continent, Australia claimed an impressive 2-2 draw against Germany
Socceroos
‘I don’t really care what other people think,’ says Australian coach
Socceroos go in at long odds, but what happens if they win?
Again.
Thanks for the ping :-)
I've tasted Vegimite.It looks like the stuff you'd scrape from the bottom of a car's oil pan.Tastes like it too!
I think you’re being kind to Vegemite. I despise the stuff. They made us eat a lot of it at boarding school and I think I might have liked it to begin with, but familiarity bred disgust.
As for soccer - I’d like for Australia to be good at it. I’d prefer for us to get back our world leading position in Rugby Union - I could even live with being second to New Zealand and challenged by South Africa, but it hurts when we can’t even be sure of beating England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland.
I was just assuming,incorrectly perhaps,that soccer isn't big Down Under just as is the case here in the US and Canada as well.In Canada hockey is the national sport (it's the national religion,actually),followed by the CFL which is much like our football.Here,it's American football and then baseball.
In Oz I always though that cricket was #1 followed by Australian-rules football and then,perhaps,tennis.
Oh,and surfing too...I once visited Narabeen,which is mentioned in the classic Beach Boys song "Surfin USA".
And as for Vegimite,once was once too often...for me at least.
It's complicated. :)
Cricket is certainly popular Australia wide and is by far the most popular summer sport. Tennis is also pretty popular.
In winter - Australia is a divided nation when it comes to 'Football'. Which code is most popular depends very much on which state you are in. In New South Wales and Queensland, the major football league is the NRL- National Rugby League. In the other four states, Australian Rules Football has always been dominant, with the AFL (Australian Football League) being the most dominant code. With two of the three most populous states playing one code, and the other being popular in the second populous state and the smaller states, we've basically got a split personality on this.
It's not as dramatic as it used to be - when I was kid growing up in Victoria, Rugby League basically had no real presence in this state at all - and if you went to New South Wales, you basically no real sign of Aussie Rules. Today, both games are technically national - but these numbers will kind of show you how things are still dominated by states.
The National Rugby League has sixteen teams. Of those sixteen:
10 are based in New South Wales
3 are based in Queensland
1 is based in the ACT (Canberra)
1 is based in Victoria
1 is based in New Zealand
The Australian Football League (Australian Rules Football) has 18 teams.
10 are based in Victoria
2 are based in New South Wales
2 are based in Queensland
2 are based in Western Australia
2 are based in South Australia
Both codes claim to be national - but the spread is quite different.
Soccer used to be a reasonably niche sport, but that has started to change a lot over the last twenty years or so. Our top level competition is now a national league with a decent standard in world terms (although the best players still get siphoned off to Europe).
There are 10 teams in the A-League:
4 in New South Wales
2 in Victoria
1 in Queensland
1 in South Australia
1 in Western Australia
1 in New Zealand
So in a way, it's the most balanced sport across the country.
It's still only the third most popular in Australia, but it's now quite significant - about 2 million people follow the A-League versus about 3 million for the NRL and 6 million for the AFL.
We also have Rugby Union which is a bit weird in terms of support - the national rugby union leagues (technically there's a national league and one that includes teams from a number of different countries) are quite small, but the national level team that plays overseas - the Wallabies - are extremely popular. So it's a sport that Australians don't follow that much internally, but that is really important to us on the international scale. The reason for that is until quite recently, Rugby Union was an amateur sport with strict rules on players remaining amateurs. Those rules have now been relaxed (in 1995), but we still have a situation that it's quite a low money sport at league level, but if a player is good enough to get to the top, there is suddenly a lot of money involved.
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