Season 2011 Matches played 25 | Teams 18 | |
Winners Collingwood (1st title) Attendance 518,572 (average 20,743 per match) Michael Tuck Medallist Heath Shaw (Collingwood) | ||
The 2011 NAB Cup was the Australian Football League (AFL) pre-season competition played before the 2011 home and away season. The games were played between 11 February and 11 March. The first match was between Adelaide and Melbourne in Adelaide at AAMI Stadium.
Contents
This was the first time since 2003 that the competition format had changed. With the introduction of the Gold Coast Football Club and Greater Western Sydney Giants (the latter required to make the competition feature a manageable 18 teams), the format for the 2011 NAB Cup was as follows:
Games
The first round fixtures were announced by the AFL on 26 October 2010.
NAB Challenge
Teams that are eliminated from the NAB Cup are scheduled to play against each other, mostly at regional venues, to provide all teams warm-up games for the main season and expose regional audiences to AFL level football.
On 16 December 2010, the AFL announced the towns that will play host to the NAB Challenge competition. In week 1, the Adelaide suburb of Thebarton hosted an AFL pre-season game for the first time at Thebarton Oval where SANFL team Woodville-West Torrens plays. Traeger Park in Alice Springs, Manuka Oval, Visy Park and Skilled Stadium also hosted matches. Week 2 saw matches played at Lavington for the first time since 2006 as well as games at Southport, Bunbury, Shepparton, Visy Park and AAMI Stadium. In the final week of the competition, matches were played at Coffs Harbour, North Ballarat, Southport, Willaston near Gawler (SA), Fremantle, Aurora Stadium and Visy Park.