Australian rules football is a pointlessly complex, over-officiated, utterly baffling sport that just so happens to also be the greatest game on the planet.
It’s a mystery even to most ardent, life-long fans of the game, so lord help any poor interloper from across the way who stumbles into it and has to try and make heads or tails of what’s going on.
Despite the long-ingrained history the sport has with ESPN (VFL football was a staple of the then-fledgling network’s programming in the 80s, would you believe), no one on the current roster of presenters has even the foggiest idea what the sport is about.
About once a year, something that goes down in the AFL is spectacular enough to warrant attention from our gr8 US m8s, and the resulting footage of mystified presenters trying to wade through their narration is universally hilarious.
This time around, it was Essendon‘s spectacular last-minute capitulation to Sydney from this past weekend (author’s note: typing every letter of that sentence caused me immense, immeasurable agony). On Sportscenter‘s recurring ‘Bad Beats‘ segment (author’s note again: **SOB**), host Scott van Pelt and sidekick Steve Coughlin tried to make sense of what in the blue hell they just watched.
They came up a little short.
Fair play to them, that’s not too far off the mark. Still a shanked kick out on the full, but.
Next time someone needs to slip the word “clanger” into the teleprompter just to watch their heads explode.
Source: YouTube.
