As the AFL spreads its tentacles further into the hearts and minds of Australian sporting culture, not everyone is happy about it.

Stephen Samuelson, sports editor of smh.com.au writes in an editorial on his website that Australian Rules Football is a "dead end sport" that hinders Australia's progress on the world sporting stage.

He believes "the more the AFL succeeds, the smaller the talent pool of the athletes available for international competition," and calls AFL expansion "the subsidising of Victorian parochialism."

Certainly Australian Rules is the country's dominant football code and tends to attract the best athletes, especially in Victoria, W.A. and South Australia. Kids like Jack Watts, who were talented basketball players, more often that not, choose footy.

Whether that affects Australia's international sporting competitions is hard to say.

Do we know for a fact that the playing lists of the 16 AFL teams are filled with kids who could be Olympic triple jumpers, lugers or handball players?

Or more importantly kids who want to be?

The idea that AFL recruiters are stealing kids like Jack Trengove and Gary Rohan away from field hockey or tennis is ludicrous.

In this free market economy, kids can choose whatever sport they want. It just so happens they like Aussie Rules.

The AFL, despite its lack of international opportunities, is a fully professional, incredibly well-run and well-supported league. The crowds are astounding, the passion unlike anything else in the world.

It is the be-all-and-end-all for most of these kids, and for good reason.

And I don't think it matters that there's no three-Test series against the Kiwis.

It's not that different from the National Football League. Granted, the United States has a population nearly 15 times that of Australia, and the NFL has much more of a global presence than the AFL. But gridiron, like Aussie Rules, is an indigenous game.

Peyton Manning doesn't compete internationally and I don't think it worries him. And I don't see too many American kids turning down a scholarship to play football at Florida State so they can concentrate on the bobsleigh.

You can talk all you want about a "pathway to Olympic sports," but the reality is that kids will gravitate to the sports they think are the most fun and the most important in the culture they grow up in. And, perhaps more importantly, the sport that their friends are playing. It's American football in the ghettos of Miami. It's Australian football in the country towns of Victoria.

Back in the States, I knew some guys who played football at a small school called Pacific Lutheran. The team was great, year after year, and the coach, a guy with the wonderfully poetic name of Frosty Westering, had a saying, "Make the big time where you are."

It may sound corny, but his kids bought into it; they knew they weren't playing Notre Dame on national television, but they believed that what they were doing was the most important thing in the world.

I feel that way about the AFL. This is the big time, no doubt about it, even if Geelong and St. Kilda aren't matched up in a Footy Champions League group with Pyongyang Dynamo and the Singapore Lions.

Back to Samuelson's article. His penultimate line is this: "What's the pinnacle of the AFL? A Grand Final appearance with Collingwood?"

My answer? Yes it is. And it's pretty damned special.