Hot on the heels of the previous day’s frenzy of emails being fired between Asia’s Footy Houses, things went unusually quiet. By lunchtime, still with nothing to distract the Swans from their day job, an email was urgently sent to Pizza Dan the Man (Bali Geckos) requesting one of those free opinions he was offering us in abundance the previous day. As it happens, he had just fired off an Asian Footy email stirring things up again!

 The Geckos are big supporters of the seeding system believing that each year as the Champs grow, it makes “less and less sense” to stay with the random. He makes the point that with a random draw, if the 5 weakest teams happened to end up in the same group, then it’s impossible for the best two teams to play off in the final. The Geckos want to start an informal league which would mean that games start to carry some weight.

The Philippines Eagles, who won’t field a team this year, make the point that the Asian Champs is the only true regional AFL competition happening in the world. There’s no EEC Champs, a North v South America Champs or a Middle East Champs. The Eagles support a seeding system – in part to get greater recognition back in Australia to get support for helping develop footy locally.

The China Reds and Tokyo Goannas also supported a seeding system.

The Jakarta Bintangs think a seeding system might be getting a bit too serious. The Asian Champs is really about having good fun, playing footy and meeting others from the region with a similar interest.  But do you “want to run a seeded draw based on previous results, relative population numbers and GDP per capita? (If you do) I can probably find an economist to develop the logarithms and run the appropriate regressions”! (Dropping logarithms must be as much fun as dropping blogs.)

Back to the Geckos: “There is an underlying feeling that Asian footy is finding it’s feet and is not just a bunch of beer-gutted blokes on a piss up, and that’s not a bad thing. It’s not about finding the correct regressions, but the best progressions.”

So, it would seem that while we are headed for the random draw for our inaugural appearance, 2008 may very well be the year of the inaugural appearance of the seeded draw.

Should the draw for the Asian Champs be seeded or random? Post a comment and let’s start a bit of Blog Biffo!