IF YOU'RE Irish and if your taste in sport leans towards the exotic, there'll be plenty on Australian television to interest you in the coming weeks.
Next Friday you can watch Ireland play Australia at international rules, the hybrid code (round ball and rectangular field with tackling allowed) that was invented to allow Ireland's Gaelic footballers and Australia's AFL footballers, neither of whom had anyone to play against overseas, to compete against each other.
A few nights later you can tune into Fox Sports to see Ireland's rugby league team make their opening appearance, against Tonga, in the 2008 World Cup. Ireland's coach, Andy Kelly, has been quoted as saying his team has a "realistic" chance of making the semi-finals, which is probably true, given the team consists largely of Englishmen.
Channel Seven, which is broadcasting the two international rules Tests (the second will be played a week later), apparently believes the games will draw a decent national audience. With luck, the audience may reach a million. Three years ago, when international rules Tests were last staged in Australia, 800,000-plus viewers tuned in, more than half of them in Melbourne.
There's plenty of interest in Ireland, too, which is why Ireland's main daily newspapers, plus the national broadcaster RTE TV, are sending journalists to cover the matches. One of them, Sean Moran of The Irish Times , told Square Eyes: "It attracts quite a lot of interest here all right. It's a bit of a novelty. That's reflected when a series is held here. Matches are sold out."
One reason for the interest this year is the on-field violence that occurred in the 2006 series, causing the competition to be suspended last year. According to one theory, the violence probably stems from the fact that players on both sides are unaccustomed to playing for their country and get carried away by the emotion of it when the opportunity arises.
Ryan Crowley, of the Fremantle Dockers, who played for Australia in the 2006 series, has described the emotion this way: "When you pull on that Australian jumper it's a weird sort of feeling. You get that sort of sense of playing for your country and you've got the whole country looking at you."
The Rugby League World Cup is a different matter, of course. By all accounts, you could walk the length of Dublin's O'Connell Street today and not meet anyone who knows an Irish team is competing, much less takes an interest in how the team performs.
Predictably, the rugby union fraternity has already begun to scoff at the World Cup, saying it merely shows how desperate league is to acquire a genuine international dimension. Nothing new about that, though. As far back as 1888, Albert (A.G.) Spalding, of sporting goods fame, brought two teams of American baseballers to Australia to try to drum up overseas interest in his favourite sport. Whether or not Spalding's players were successful at this, they did take part in one fascinating contest: a cricket match at the SCG, in which 18 American baseballers played 11 Sydney club cricketers. The cricketers won comfortably.
(Which brings to mind the best quote about baseball ever made by a cricketer. In 1935-36, the Australian cricket team touring South Africa played a game of baseball against a team of South Africans, in which the Australian batsman Stan McCabe made several big hits. McCabe was surprised when people congratulated him later on his hitting. "How can you miss?" he said. "They're all full tosses.")
Channel Seven will screen next Friday's Test live in Melbourne and Adelaide, but Sydney viewers will only be able to see it on replay at 11.30pm.