Super Bowl Sunday

In the last ten years, I've done the same thing on the first weekend in February - gone round to one my mate's and watched the Super Bowl with beer and pizza.

Last night was no different (apart from the floodlights failing). The Super Bowl is pretty much the only time I drink lager - it just seems to go with pizza and American football. If I were more organised, I'd get something a) American and b) decent, like Brooklyn Lager, instead of Stella.

American football is actually my second favourite US sport (on a list of two: I can't get into ice hockey and find basketball ridiculous). The end of the NFL postseason can only mean one thing. As Shelley might have said, if winter is over, can baseball spring training be far behind?

Franchise football

I suppose it had to happen. AFC Wimbledon will play MK Dons in the next round of the FA Cup.

AFC are the club set up by fans in 2002 when Wimbledon FC moved to Milton Keynes. The boycott of what was dubbed "Franchise FC" continued until 2007 when MK Dons gave up their claim to Wimbledon's historical record, including winning the FA Cup in 1988. AFC Wimbledon also helped Manchester United fans set up FC United, a similar community-run club, after the Glazer takeover at Old Trafford in 2005.

While clubs moving cities is almost unknown here, in North America lots of NFL and Major League Baseball "franchises" have relocated thousands of miles away, in some cases more than once. Like the people who run the Premier League, the owners of US sports teams are more interested in TV viewers than the fans who go to games. You might think this means that US sports teams are less rooted in their communities but that isn't always the case. When the owner of the Cleveland Browns NFL team relocated the "franchise" to Baltimore in 1995, fans succesfully fought for a new team in the city that retained the original team's colours and historical record. And I still remember on my first trip to New York in 2002 talking to baseball fans about the bitterness in the city after the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers left for the West Coast in the late 50's. Like MK Dons, the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Francisco Giants should be seen as new clubs. The storied legacies of the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers - the team that broke baseball's colour bar by signing Jackie Robinson in 1947 - belong not to them but to the New York Mets, the team that replaced them in the National League in 1962 and deliberately combined their colours.

1845 and all that

I picked up a slim book the other day that includes the original 1845 and 1871 rules of rugby.

A nineteenth century fan of rugby football would recognise most of the play in the modern games of rugby league and rugby union. As the introduction points out, rule 18 from 1871, "any player holding or running with the ball being tackled and the ball being fairly held he must at once cry down and there put it down" is very close to the play-the-ball rule in rugby league.

The football game played at Rugby School in the 1840's is the forerunner not just of rugby league and rugby union but American football too. A modern NFL fan would have no problem understanding rule 43: "A player who has made and claimed a fair catch shall thereupon either take a drop kick or a punt or place the ball for a place kick."

London calling?

The NFL arrived in London again at the weekend with the annual International Series game that’s been played at Wembley since 2007. I went to the 2008 and 2009 games, with a mate who lives in North West London and has been a fan of American football since the 1980’s, and enjoyed them both.

The St Louis Rams-New England Patriots match-up was expected to be a one-sided contest and that’s how it turned out with the Massachusetts outfit running out 45-7 winners. But that doesn’t seem to have affected the NFL’s enthusiasm for expanding American football in the UK with the league announcing a second game will be played here from 2013. The owner of the New England Patriots Robert Kraft also said that the he sees a second game as a step towards having a NFL team based in London. I think that might have been a bit of hype to sell the game.

I know that from two games to the eight home games a London team would play isn’t a huge leap but there are other questions too.  Would the other teams be happy about crossing the Atlantic every season? Would the London team be a relocated existing team or part of an expansion of the league? It would be a bit odd to have a London team but not one in Los Angeles although a team that could match the 80,000 attendances of the International Series would be one of the best supported in the NFL.

If the NFL does go ahead with a London team, perhaps they could train in Iceland to cut down on travelling time.

The curse of the Chargers?

Police in Southern California have discovered the body of former San Diego Chargers linebacker Junior Seau after he apparently killed himself with a gunshot to the chest.

The method of suicide is similar to that of Chicago Bears safety Dave Duerson last February. Duerson left instructions that his brain be examined by a medical team at Boston University investigating Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, a brain condition found in boxers, ice hockey players and American footballers who have received blows to the head.

Seau is also the eighth member of the 1994 San Diego Chargers Super Bowl team to die. Three of the other seven died in accidents but another four have died in their late thirties or early forties as the result of drug or heart problems. 

The premature deaths of so many apparently fit and relatively young men cannot be a coincidence. It demonstrates the dangers - eliminated or at least restricted in other sports - of allowing players in American football to bulk up (legally or illegally) and then clash heads with each other.

Grappling on the gridiron

The National Football League is investigating allegations that New Orleans Saints defensive players set up a so-called bounty programme that paid them for injuring opponents.

There's nothing wrong with big hits, either in American football or rugby league.  The difference is the injuries they cause.  Because linemen in American football don't have to run with the ball, there's more incentive for them to bulk up, either legally or illegally. And the amount of protective gear American football players wear conversely seems to lead to more injury.  Padded up players are more reckless in tackles and collision with a metal helmet is far more likely to cause concussion than a clash of heads.