Remember Peter Bossink who starred in the Asian Champs last year (see left and middle picture above)?

Like the jumping frog, he’s kicked on and landed in France.

Last weekend, Peter Pierre played in “La Coupe de France”, which is the French National AFL Championship. The match was played in Paris and as you can see in the photo above on the right side, Paris set aside one of its finest paddocks for the boys to have a kick in.

Their paddock is actually a rugby field (“read concrete covered with patches of dirt and rocks”, according to Pete) just outside of Paris. Teams came from Bordeaux, Strasbourg, Montpellier and Paris. Because of the small size of the paddock, they played with only 9 per side.

Pete says, “It was no Asian Champs but for a game only new to French soil, and the fact that from the four teams that played, there were only 7 Australians and one South Australian – the quality was very high. The Frenchmen played very hard football. The skills were not so good but the effort they put in made up for that. The ambulance was called twice – both times for players on the Paris side (a very bad ankle injury and a neck injury)”. 

Paris eventually won the competition.

There will be a game against the orange people in Amsterdam on 12 July 2008.

According to Peter Pierre, over in France, everyone says, “Eat a baguette if you love footy”.

Extraordinary.