Ansett Australia Cup
Upcoming season or competition: 2017 JLT Community Series
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| Sport | Australian rules football |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1988 |
| No. of teams | 18 |
| Country | Australia |
| Most titles |
Essendon, Hawthorn (4 premierships) |
The Australian Football League pre-season competition, known during its history by a variety of sponsored names and most recently as the AFL Pre-season Challenge, was an annual Australian rules football tournament held amongst Australian Football League (AFL) senior clubs prior to the premiership season between 1988 and 2013. The pre-season competition culminated annually in a Grand Final and pre-season premier.
After the 2013 season, the pre-season competition has consisted of a series of matches without an eventual winner. This series is currently known by the name JLT Community Series.
The pre-season competition was established from the Australian Football Championships Night Series in 1988. The Night Series had been a competition featuring VFL, SANFL, WAFL and minor states representative teams which had been staged partly in the pre-season and partly during the premiership season, generally finishing in July; but, it had reduced in size and importance until 1987, when only VFL teams were involved and the competition was finished by the end of April. In 1988, the competition was moved entirely into the pre-season, and became the VFL Pre-season Cup. The pre-season competition is generally considered to be of equivalent importance as both the AFC Night Series and the VFL Night Series (1956–1971), and records relating to the three competitions are often combined.
Between 1988 and 1999, the competition was run as a simple knock-out tournament in which the winning teams moved through to the next round and losing teams were eliminated. Before there were sixteen teams in the AFL, the previous season's top ranked teams (either the premier or both grand finalists) were advanced directly to the second round; after Fremantle entered the league as the 16th team in 1995, all teams began in the first round. In 1992, the competition introduced the Michael Tuck Medal for the best player in the grand final.
After criticism that the knock-out format limited the preparation of the losing teams, a round-robin format was introduced in 2000. The sixteen teams were split into groups of four, each playing three pool matches with the winner of each group advancing to the knockout semi-final stage. The public reaction to the change was mixed, as the atmosphere at some of the pool games was noticeably flat compared with previous years. The competition reverted to the straight knock-out format in 2003, and retained that format until 2010.
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