There was a unique football code, homegrown,
That discovered it was not quite all alone,
So the code it most resembled
Got its best players assembled
And now the players have national jerseys to own.

That weak attempt is in honour of Limerick, the venue of Saturday's opening Test in the International Rules series with Ireland, which was a highly enjoyable spectacle of skill. I've always liked International Rules as a concept: you can see that it means a lot to the players, although I think that the Irish are right to suspect that Australian enthusiasm for the series is a cover for the fact that it represents a high-standard recruiting audition for the Irish youngsters they already have their eyes on. Legendary Tyrone manager Mickey Harte certainly is a consistently vocal critic of the hybrid code along these lines, but if you put the cynicism aside, the game as it was played on Saturday is worthwhile. Australia now picks a team for the hybrid code and takes it seriously, but not seriously enough to flick the switch to the deplorable kind of thuggery that the boys in blue displayed on their last trip to Ireland in 2006. Back then the likes of Chance Bateman, Nick Davis and Adam Selwood were very lucky not to be given long holidays from the AFL, as the Australians seemed intent on channeling the bad old black-and-white TV days of interstate carnivals. It smacked of a footy trip mentality, with seemingly little difference between how they carried themselves on the field and Brendan Fevola's YouTube special recorded later in the tour by a bar's security cameras (watch that again and cringe at the barmaid's fear.) I've always thought that the concession the Irish have to make - to full body contact, tackling and shepherding, at the hands of people who are experienced in it - is much more difficult than the Australians' task of having to get used to the vagaries of the round ball. It always seemed to be a form of racial profiling to assume that the Irish would be up for a physical stoush - them bein' Oirish lads - when they were in fact skilled amateur players of a game with basketball-like contact rules, used to the incidental contact of their game but completely foreign to the deliberate shirtfronts and shepherds and physical working-over - not to mention outright punches - given them by bigger, harder more professional Australian bodies. I'm sure they have given as good as their limited experience in the rough stuff allows them to do, but the fact is that it's not part of their game and they're nowhere near as effective at it. After 2006, I thought they were well within their rights to delay the resumption of the series, until the Australians cooled off. Thankfully wiser heads have prevailed and the 2008 series was clean, and that led to the wonderful display of Saturday in Limerick. This time around the Australians have decided to play the game properly, not trying to prove how much tougher they are. The irony is that this improvement in skills seems to have unnerved Ireland a whole lot more than the biffo, and they were distinctly on the back foot in the first half on Saturday until they finally let loose their sweeping handball chains and run in the second half to come home strongly. The decider at Croke Park in Dublin next weekend - where there will be 50,000 more passionate locals than the Limerick's Gaelic Grounds could fit - will be an intriguing match.

He's short, he's mean, his pay packet's obscene

$320,000 a week. Try to get your head around that amount, which is what Wayne Rooney has apparently chiseled out of the Glazer family, owners of Manchester United, after his short-lived rebellion and self-banishment from Old Trafford. And then try to get your head around the fact that Rooney's pay rise - reportedly double what he was getting - only takes him to number three on the list of the big earners: according to the Football Finance site, Real Madrid pays Cristiano Ronaldo $384,000 a week, while Barcelona's Zlatan Ibrahimovic banks $355,000. (In contrast, the Catalan cash machine only pays Lionel Messi a paltry $310,00 a week: it's a wonder that the Argentinian doesn't go on strike, instead of producing strike after strike.) On Football Finance's numbers Rooney jumps from the 20th best-paid player to number three; although his new deal probably only equals Yaya Toure's mid-year deal with cashed-up Manchester City - the only club likely to have the wherewithal to make a serious play for Rooney, given its access to owner Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan's trouser pocket. The deal is a stunning coup for Rooney's agent Paul Stretford, the former vacuum cleaner salesman who has plugged the Hoover in to Malcolm Glazer's personal vault, playing off the Man U boss' fear that the local rival could steal the club's truculent star. If Stretford's success fee is running at the same percentage commission that he first negotiated with Man U back in 2004, he has just made himself £4 million, or $6.4 million. As for the delightful Coleen, it is not known what deal she has negotiated for herself. If Sir Alex Ferguson, who looked for all the world a devastated man last week when announcing that Rooney was leaving, can control the disharmony that is sure to fester in the Man U dressing room at Rooney's successful bluff, then he is a management genius: the monster egos that inhabit that domain will not take this affront quietly. And if the Glazer family, with debts estimated by the BBC Panorama program at £1.1 billion, can actually afford this pay rise, then they are financial geniuses. Yes, for an injury-prone 25-year-old with a troubled personal life, who has scored just one Premier League goal, a penalty, in seven months, Rooney has done very well for himself. It is obscene.

Plot thickens in four-quarter game

Three rounds in to the new split-innings format of the Ryobi Cup and we're finally seeing the potential of the new arrangement. Tasmania's win over New South Wales at the weekend was probably the first game of the Ryobi Cup where we saw the game definitely change after half-time. Tasmania was struggling in the first "quarter", also in the second, but came storming back in the third quarter and stifled NSW in the final innings. South Australia also got back into the game in Townsville with a tremendous third quarter, but couldn't hold on in the heat and Queensland prevailed in dramatic circumstances: Victoria, too, lifted in the third quarter of its match against Western Australia, but ultimately couldn't compete with Liam Davis' second straight ton. But we are at last seeing that teams that don't start well can get themselves back into the match: this could always have happened in fifty-over cricket, but the games are now settling into a nice unpredictability in terms of the four stanzas - kind of like another sport I can think of. The other thing that the Tasmania-New South Wales game demonstrated is that there are other spinners in Australia than Nathan Hauritz - imagine that!

Osieck, Osieck, Osieck: Oi, Oi, Oi

What a difference a new boss makes. Australia's soccer pros - at least those plying their trade at home - have to be very impressed with new Socceroos coach Holger Osieck's public praise for the A-League, which stands in stark contrast to the dismissive attitude of his predecessor Pim Verbeek, who as good as gave aspiring Socceroo players the ultimatum to move to a European league or forget about it. But Osieck has been all humility so far, doing the rounds of the A-League, taking notes, talking to players, managers and referees, and generally looking like he gives a damn about the local league. Verbeek clearly thought it was second-rate: Osieck realises that it is from where much of his cattle for Kuwait in 2011, London in 2012 and Brazil in 2014 will come. To be fair, Verbeek did give opportunities to youngsters such as Tommy Oar, Nikita Rukavytsya and Dario Vidosic: Osieck knows that the likes of Matthew Leckie, Mate Dugandzic, Mustafa Amini, Kofi Danning, Mitch Langerak, Karem Bulut, Ben Kantarovski, Sean Rooney, Todd Howarth, and Anthony Juric are the future, and giving them confidence that they're well and truly on his radar where they are playing is wise. In fact it makes one wonder how the FFA put up with the snubbing of its flagship league by Verbeek.

Careering off in Korea not good for career

Could Yeongam have gone any worse for Red Bull, short of actual physical injury to either of its drivers? The inaugural Korean Grand Prix was a debacle for Red Bull, with the failure of both Mark Webber and Sebastian Vettel to finish allowing Ferrari's Fernando Alonso to harvest full value from this season's new points system, surging past Webber to take the world championship lead with just two races to complete. If you don't finish a race, that's what can happen: there's 25 points on offer for someone who can finish. With two races remaining, Alonso has 231 points to Webber's 220, while McLaren driver Lewis Hamilton's second place at Yeongam lifts him to third position in the title race with 210 points, while Vettel falls to fourth on 206. The conditions in Korea were dreadful - Alonso described the three laps of the first attempt to start as the "worst I've ever driven in" - but once they got fully under way, Webber blamed nothing but himself for catching the kerb and spinning out. (Vettel would not have been so magnanimous, given the engine meltdown that forced him out.) Alonso grabbed the chance to take the lead and ratchet up the pressure on Webber, but given decent conditions in Brazil and Abu Dhabi, the Australian knows that his car is faster. If he wins both races, it will not matter what Alonso does. But another DNF would certainly not be in his plans.