Beware Dog Day Afternoons With Australia's Mongrels

Anyone reading Sydney's newspapers over the past month could be forgiven for thinking there was not much more to sport than violence, alcohol abuse, "disappointing" behavior in night clubs, head injuries and mental stress laced with a heavy serving of aggression and just a touch of violence. But we'll come back to the launch of the trans-Tasman netball league shortly.

The rugby league season has been dominated by controversy over new tackling techniques that allegedly threaten opposing players with serious injury. Last year's "grappler" has been superseded by the "prowler" (two players hold up the ball-carrier, while a third charges into his back), the "chicken wing" (tackler grabs a loose arm and uses bodyweight to force it into unnatural positions) and the "extreme prejudice" (tackler produces a pistol from his shorts and disposes of opponent before turning to ref with arms outstretched and a "Who? Me?" expression).

Sadly, only one of those is invented. As Brian Waldron, the coach of the Gold Coast Titans, pointed out: "It's not just us - every team has wrestling coaches."

In Australian Rules football the violence is less like wrestling and more like what, in a world of flagrant euphemism, we should probably call the sweet science. The Sydney Swans' previously reformed villain, Big Bad Barry Hall, had to remove the ironic quotation marks from his nickname after felling Brent Staker of the West Coast Eagles for no apparent reason during last weekend's match. After delivering a brutal left uppercut, the former boxer admitted it looked "really ordinary" on the replay.

In Australian sporting parlance, that is about as bad as it gets. You might get away with something shocking, vicious or disgraceful, but an action deemed ordinary is beyond redemption. To put it in an English context, you might say Fulham have had an atrocious season, but Derby's has been distinctly ordinary.

BBB's previous most publicized misdemeanor was a thump to the body of St Kilda's Matt McGuire in 2005 that inexplicably became known as the "love tap". After watching his son feel the love, Staker's father denounced Hall as a "weak mongrel", which curiously was almost the same phrase used about another athlete in trouble.

The swimmer Nick D'Arcy faces charges after allegedly breaking the jaw, eye socket, palate, cheekbone and nose of a team-mate with a single blow while out celebrating his selection for the Olympics. D'Arcy's coach declared that while he had "a streak of mongrel" in him, "any one of us could have reacted in the same way". And there were we thinking the lane ropes were just to keep the swimmers in a straight line.

Naturally, these outbreaks of mongrelism and ordinary behavior have done little to dampen the popularity of Australia's top spectator sports (swimming may not be among them, but celebrity night club brawling certainly is). That is frustrating for smaller sports, especially those dominated by women, such as netball. It has huge participation rates and the cleanliness of its reputation is as squeaky as rubber soles on parquet. But how can it compete with the "big hits", the raw intensity, the sheer male stupidity of league and Aussie Rules?

Sarcastic imitation of the boys' light-hearted approach to sickening violence is probably not the right answer, though there is promising material in the new league, which features five teams each from Australia and New Zealand.

Amber Bell ringer of the Central Pulse (that's a team, not a vital life-sign) is 17 and, at over 6ft, an intimidating presence. It's a name promoters should relish, one that would have appealed to boxing commentators in the Eamonn Andrews era, when fighters were forever tapping the claret or cleaning each other's clocks.

The prospect of seeing a top Aussie net baller hit with a real bell ringer might appeal to a broader audience than the sport traditionally attracts, but it seems the league is intent on fostering a less rugged image. (Journalists will have to be content to note feebly that Bell ringer chimed in with a few crucial goals and struck on the hour mark.)

Having rejected cartoon violence as a marketing strategy, the league's real image-making is rather wet. The Melbourne Vixens threaten to be "Elite. Alluring. Competitive. Victorious". The Northern Mystics from Auckland warn fans to "get ready for something mystical from the north" (not David Icke as match day host, surely?).

As if the Kiwi teams' insistence on abstract concepts was not bad enough - the Mystics are joined by the Tactix, the Magic and the Pulse, with only the Southern Steel embracing cold, hard reality - Perth fans have been landed, or possibly infected, with the West Coast Fever. Presumably the brains that came up with that were anticipating international rivalry with the Hong Kong Flu.

So with New Zealand netball wallowing in feverish magic and mysticism rather than releasing its inner mongrel, it comes as no surprise to learn that Roy Keane has ignored it. Instead he will spend time with the All Blacks in the close season, as part of his Uefa Pro License course - although he is probably overqualified for their seminar on Inciting National Trauma Through Premature World Cup Exits.

If Keane really wants to learn something, he should pop across to Sydney and take the master's degree in Violence Mitigation and Post-Aggression Justification. Then perhaps we would finally find out just how ordinary his effort on Alfie Haaland was.

Harry Pearson is away