Australian Rules Football, anyone?

Monday night in my house has become "Austrailian Rules Football on PBS" night. Have you ever watched this craziness? It's total chaos. There are three goals on each end of this oval-shaped large field. There are 44 (yes, that's 4 and 4) players on the field. All running after the same little ovally-American football-ish looking ball. These 44 players can kick the ball, run with the ball, dribble the ball (although, honestly how you dribble an oblong ball is in itself a skill), but you can't throw the ball to anybody apparently, except I see them tossing it to each other all the time. So maybe you can't throw it really far, but if you are running and dribbling, you can toss it once you are in a close enough proximity of a teammate? This is one aspect I'm not sure of yet...among many others. But, I know that you have to get it through one of the three goals by kicking it in. But, you can kick it from anywhere. If you kick it in (or even, over) the main goal with the big endposts, you get 6 points. If you kick it in through the shorter goal posts on either side of the large one, you get 1 point. An the team with the most points at the end of the game wins.

I'm sure there are bunches of other rules that I'm fuzzy on, like fouls and tackles and if anybody can get in trouble for doing anything. Seems to me that there's a lot of rough tackles and people aren't getting carded like in soccer or flags or anything like in football. Seems like everything is kind of 'beat the other guy to a pulp, but do it with a smile' kind of thing. I guess you can elbow the other guy in the face, but if you keep smiling, it looks less malicious? I don't know. It looks pretty rough to me.

There are always loud, large crowds at the games. I don't know the teams yet, nor can I fully follow the commentators. All in all it's a bit of a craps shoot for me to figure out what I'm watching, but I don't get any other sort of sports shows. I mean, I get football on weekends, but this is really interesting. Or at least, different. Maybe someday I'll learn which team is which, but with 44 guys on the field, it's completely ridiculous. Kind of like if you've ever been to a little league baseball game when it's the kids' very first few games ever and someone might actually hit the ball out of the infield and the ENTIRE infield team who are supposed to be on defense rush to the outfield after the ball. It's like these grown Australian  men are all like those little kids: I see no positions being played here, I just see panicked rushing after a ball.