MEN may be from Mars and women from Venus, but Australian rules football and rugby league are parallel universes rather than planets flanking the Earth. There are things in common - two competing teams, one ball, a grassy flat surface - but also enough significant differences to distinguish one game from the other and to attract separate sets of supporters.
So one believed. Last July, Brisbane rugby league star Karmichael Hunt defected not merely from his team, but his sport - to join the fledgling Gold Coast Football Club, which enters AFL competition next year. This week has seen a second, just as dramatic, defection, in the form of
Brisbane Broncos player Israel Folau, who has signed with another incoming team, Greater Western Sydney, coached by former Essendon legend Kevin Sheedy.
These two audacious moves have at their heart two similarities: both players are to be paid more than most top AFL players - an estimated $1 million or more a year; and both players are, to put it mildly, inexperienced in their new sport. Folau has conceded he has never played a game of Australian rules. ''I'll do whatever it takes to become a successful … player,'' he said. As he should.
Playing, however, might be of secondary concern against the primacy of Folau and Hunt's potential public-relations skills. AFL chief executive Andrew Demetriou said as much in his letter to industry insiders: ''… both players will be invaluable in promoting our game as a viable career option for first-choice athletes in Queensland and NSW in particular, and to communities which currently do not have a strong connection to our game in both states.'' Indeed, both men can be paid excessively because their extra-curricular roles will be funded outside the salary cap. Somewhere amid this panoply of publicity is the uneasy feeling that such expansionism will inflict more harm than good. Recruitment is fine from the grassroots; but suspicions are aroused when it comes from an entirely different field. Also, what does such lucrative investment in two yet-to-be-proved clubs say to supporters of long-established, but at present less successful, clubs about the AFL's motives and priorities?