Cheap Shot on Sav Rocca

Here's the video of the hit on Saverio Rocca that everyone's searching for this morning.  Watch it soon before YouTube spikes it:

I thought they made gratuitious shots on punters illegal after the Trotter hit a couple years ago?  Also, that was clearly helmet-to-helmet, although Rocca didn't so much as blink after it happened.  Tough dude.

That's also a heck of a punt from his own end zone.

Comments

[Danial]

"a little different to aussie football"
You got that right - aussies don't wear pads and helmets and our game doesnt take 8 weeks to play. Gutless cheap shot.

[Me]

I was pretty sure this would be coming at some point :)

1) They don't wear helmets -- since all contact above the shoulders is illegal -- and they don't wear pads -- and you'll never see the kind of continuous, explosive violence you get in our brand of football.

2) I watch the AFL every weekend on Setanta Sports. It's a great game, but the typical tackle is a drag down affair. Not that those guys aren't tough as hell, but it's a different kind of contact.

3) For example, your guys don't have to worry about some roving safety taking their heads off after they make a mark, since contact after the point of a catch is prohibited.

4) As for the length of the game, it seems to me that the typical live AFL broadcast takes almost three hours to get through. That's probably about 40 minutes less than one of ours. The difference is we have all those damn commercials. I think we can all agree those pretty much suck.

[Ian Whitchurch]

"3) For example, your guys don't have to worry about some roving safety taking their heads off after they make a mark, since contact after the point of a catch is prohibited."

So, you havent seen much Aussie Rules, have you ? Remember, what you call pass interference, we call good use of the body

Also, Rocca's comment to the press about the incident is a classic ... 'If thats his best shot, well, good luck to him'

[Me]

You're talking about contact before the catch is made. Sure, there's plenty of wrestling that goes on while the ball's in the air in your game, but the difference is that once the guy catches the ball, he's protected. In ours, he has to worry that someone is about to come flying into the picture with extreme prejudice.

Look, I'm not knocking Aussie Rules. If I didn't think it was a great game I wouldn't be staying up until 3am watching it. But hell, even your own announcers seem annoyed at the direction the game is taking, with new rules like that hands in the back thing.

And you don't have any 300 pounders running below five seconds in the 40-yard-dash (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Winston). Now obviously that's because those guys would be puking their guts out if they tried to run around that enormous field for 20 minutes at a time, but still.