The first AFL men\u2019s player with a Vietnamese background, Essendon\u2019s Jayden Nguyen, held his own against Sydney star Tom Papley on Saturday. Despite the Bombers\u2019 14-point defeat, Nguyen\u2019s appearance was an important milestone for a game still struggling to come to terms with its place within multicultural Australia.<\/p>\n
The 19-year-old, whose parents arrived in Australia in the 1980s, said he hoped he had made others proud. \u201cI\u2019m pretty wrapped with the support I\u2019ve got over the past few days from the Vietnamese community, and the Asian community in general,\u201d Nguyen said after the match. \u201cI just feel like it helps push me and makes me feel proud about myself.\u201d<\/p>\n
Quang Huynh, a Vietnamese-Australian working in Aussie rules, watched Nguyen\u2019s debut with interest. \u201cJayden\u2019s great for the community, just seeing, hearing his story and his journey,\u201d said Huynh, who works at the Western Bulldogs<\/a> Community Foundation. \u201cHopefully this opens up the opportunity for more Vietnamese boys and girls to play.\u201d<\/p>\n The AFL<\/a> will shortly launch a cultural diversity action plan which, as well as highlighting the game\u2019s geographic regions of priority, has a broad goal to increase participation and engagement within non-traditional football communities.<\/p>\n Despite the potential power of the AFL as an inclusive force, it remains to some a source of hate and division. The AFL issued an apology to Swans champion Adam Goodes in 2019 for failing to support him in a period he was targeted by repeated booing and the behaviour of abusive fans on social media remains a blight on the game.<\/p>\n Last year a University of South Australia and University Technology Sydney survey found 50% of AFL match-goers had witnessed racist \u201cbarracking\u201d such as name-calling, compared to 36% of NRL fans and 27% of those at the A-Leagues. Supporters in all sports reported the situation had worsened in recent years.<\/p>\n These experiences highlight the importance of the AFL\u2019s new action plan, due to be launched in coming weeks. In it, chief executive Andrew Dillon writes \u201cwhile significant progress has been made in making our game more inclusive, we recognise there is still work to do.\u201d<\/p>\n The Western Bulldogs Community Foundation runs a health and wellbeing program Hindi and Vietnamese. Photograph: Supplied<\/p>\n The plan is designed to take the game to new audiences, but Huynh\u2019s work at the Western Bulldogs Community Foundation sees the AFL from the opposite perspective. Their imperative is not to grow participation, it is to leverage the power of Australian rules to bring together people new to the country or those still on its periphery.<\/p>\n As a multicultural community engagement coordinator, Huynh helps run a health program in languages including Vietnamese and Hindi, which has included attending matches with hundreds of AFL novices. \u201cWe give our participants a beanie, a scarf, and we catch the train with them there,\u201d Huynh said.<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n Sign up to From the Pocket: AFL Weekly<\/p>\n Jonathan Horn brings expert analysis on the week’s biggest AFL stories<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy<\/a>. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy<\/a> and Terms of Service<\/a> apply.<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n \u201cWe get off at Southern Cross station and we walk to gate seven at Marvel, and you can feel the excitement because you have people looking around and you see that everyone\u2019s cheering. For someone who\u2019s newly arrived or been here for a while, that sense of, \u2018We have something in common, we support the Bulldogs,\u2019 it\u2019s a really great thing.\u201d<\/p>\n The AFL\u2019s action plan promises to introduce new school and community programs in 21 targeted local government areas around the country, including five in western Sydney. The plan is light, only eight pages, but sets out the guiding principles for the code\u2019s efforts in this space, including co-design, intersectionality and an appreciation that for some communities progress \u201cwill be a long journey\u201d.<\/p>\n This week staff responsible for the work met in western Sydney for an education and training workshop, and the first programs \u2013 including a multicultural one in Dandenong and another with the Chinese community in Perth \u2013 have already begun. \u201cBy continuing to listen, learn, and evolve, we can build on the foundations already in place to create an environment where all cultures feel respected and represented,\u201d Dillon said.<\/p>\n Commentators Agnes Yao Lu and Barney Yu Xia practising ahead of their Mandarin Fox Footy coverage of Brisbane v Sydney in round 22. Photograph: Supplied<\/p>\n The workshop coincides with a historic week for Asian-Australian followers of the game. In addition to the debut of Nguyen last Saturday, Hindi commentary was provided by Fox Footy for the Western Bulldogs v GWS Giants clash last Thursday. Mandarin will be heard on coverage of the Brisbane v Sydney match this Saturday.<\/p>\n Barney Yu Xia, a payroll officer by day, will sit behind the mic alongside Agnes Yao Lu, having been involved in community broadcasting and in-language coverage of football. He moved to Australia from Hefei in China in 2012 to study media, but wasn\u2019t drawn to AFL until he met another Melburnian in a public toilet in Cairns in 2015.<\/p>\n \u201cWe were washing our hands, and he said, \u2018Where were you from?\u2019 I said \u2018I\u2019m from Melbourne\u2019 and he was like \u2018Okay \u2026 Melbourne. Western Bulldogs? I was like, \u2018I have no idea\u2019,\u201d he said. \u201cBut I thought that people living in Melbourne should understand Australian rules. That\u2019s how I got into it, and then I started to like it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The first AFL men\u2019s player with a Vietnamese background, Essendon\u2019s Jayden Nguyen, held his own against Sydney star…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":48076,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[560],"tags":[638,64,63,55,639,85],"class_list":["post-48075","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-afl","tag-afl","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-australian-football-league","tag-australianfootballleague","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48075","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48075"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48075\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/48076"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48075"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48075"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48075"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}