The Most Skilful Sport in the World?

In the recent weeks, a recurring conversation with a number of Australians has kept alive an argument that they will not let go; which sport is the most skilful in the world?
Naturally, the Australians feel they have the winner, or else they wouldn’t be so keen to continue the argument. Their beloved AFL (“Aussie Rules”) is, according to them, the perfect blend of speed, accuracy of passing and kicking, strength and toughness. It is certainly tougher than the similar sport we sometimes see played, the Irish Gaelic football. But can it really be the most skilful sport in the world?

I always point to the football we see from week to week in our Premiership (and, of course the leagues below),which must be up there in terms of skill. With the likes of Michael Carrick and Steven Gerrard fizzing passes around, and players with Wayne Rooney or Thierry Henry’s control receiving them, soccer must eclipse anything that Antipodean version of “footy” has got. Aussie Rules is a game that is very impressive because of its scale- they play on a cricket pitch, so it’s enormous, and they play with eighteen players a side. In a nation so enormous, perhaps they find all other sports rather meagre in comparison, and the AFL is the only one that suit’s the grand scale of size they’re used to. My response has always been to boast soccer as an infinitely more skilful sport- there is nothing so cultured as the raw skill of Cristiano Ronaldo or Cesc Fabregas in the ungainly efforts down under.

Now I have thought about it, however, I would probably look elsewhere than soccer. Each player does a fairly well-defined separate job, not all players master all the skills involved (apart from in League Two, where the mighty Hartlepool have recently shown themselves masters of the trade on all fronts en route to promotion). And something as simple as size can make a difference, whether particularly skilful or not- Duncan Ferguson made a career out of being tall and ludicrously short-tempered.

That rules out a lot of team sports, however, including rugby and cricket. While the jobs of, for instance, the scrum-half, the fly-half, and the blindside flanker are very skilful, they are also very specialised. Cricketers, too, stick to their own discipline of bowling or batting, with little scope for truly excelling in both as an all-rounder. The art of bowling spin in cricket must be more difficult than anything you see in Aussie Rules- they simply run around punching the ball to each other and bouncing it every few metres to avoid being penalised. But spin bowlers don’t tend to contribute all around the game like Aussie Rules players do.

There are so many sports which you feel could challenge the Aussie Rules fans’ arrogance- ice hockey is a sport that, having tried it, I have utmost respect for. Hockey skills are tricky enough without strapping a pair of blades to your feet and sliding around a treacherous surface. Similarly, Polo must be an awkward sport to master, having the unpredictability factor of having to aim your shots while astride a living, breathing, beast of burden. Even so, I would probably go for a multi-sports discipline as my final answer to the Australians- a decathlon (or heptathlon) is a fantastically sadistic way to bludgeon the body into submission, where often competitors perform at world class standard in all but one or two of the total amount of disciplines tackled. The range of skills on show there is phenomenal; but as for a team sport that beats the all-round skills of the AFL? Soccer’s probably closest. But, to my dismay, the Australians might just win this as well.