Letter From Australia: In a week in which the Australian sporting media has shifted its obsession with footballers' behaviour up a few gears, Australian Football League (AFL) player Alan Didak has beaten a motley field for the title of biggest off-field idiot by being indirectly tied up with a bikie murder.

As described in this column last week, Melbourne city lawyer Brendan Keilar was heading into his chambers to start his day's work on a Monday morning when he saw a man dragging a woman by the hair. His intervention cost him his life when the man, later revealed to be a member of the Hells Angels motorcycle gang, pulled out a handgun and shot Keilar, along with a 25-year-old Dutch tourist, who was also trying to help the stricken woman, and the woman. The tourist and the woman survived.

During investigations, police found in the murderer's mobile phone a number for Didak, who last year won the best-player award at Collingwood, which is not only Australian football's biggest club but the biggest club in any sport in the country.

Police called in Didak as a witness to their murder investigation and discovered the footballer had been with the bikie member a week before the murder. On that occasion, Didak and several fellow AFL players had been drinking in a bar in Melbourne's King Street, a notorious nightclub strip, when the bikie member declared he was a Collingwood fan and bought Didak a drink.

When Didak's football mates went home, he stayed on to drink with the bikie. The bikie offered Didak a lift home, after which he failed to come through with his promise. Instead of driving the Collingwood star back to his digs, he took him to a Hells Angels clubhouse in a distant suburb, before firing shots at a police car. Didak eventually was dropped back in the city, from where he caught a taxi home and told no one about his hair-raising adventures.

It was a week after Didak's adventures that the bikie pulled his gun on the good-hearted lawyer. Collingwood officials were furious when police informed them of Didak's link to the gunman, but not as much as the mother of the murdered lawyer. Her comments that her son might still be alive if Didak had come forward to police about the danger presented by the violent bikie sparked a surge of sympathy.

Commentators demanded that Collingwood suspend or fine Didak for bringing the club and, especially, the game into disrepute. The Magpies have held their ground, and played Didak in yesterday's match against fellow competition leaders Hawthorn, but their celebrity president is promising retribution and justice - two mighty words in the tabloid world in which he lives - when further details are expected to come to light this week.

Another AFL club, Fremantle, based in Western Australia, played without star forward Chris Tarrant on Saturday, having suspended him for his nightclub shenanigans in Darwin, in Australia's Top End, after the previous week's match. Tarrant bared his buttocks at a woman in the dance hall before becoming involved in a fight, behaviour that was once expected of AFL players on Saturday nights, but is now considered a heinous act, like smoking.

On the weekend that Fremantle penalised Tarrant, they welcomed back another errant forward, Jeff Farmer, who had been suspended for six weeks after punching a nightclub doorman. Farmer atoned for the latest of his regular indiscretions by kicking four goals on Saturday and leading Fremantle to an enormous victory over Melbourne club Carlton.

Farmer and Tarrant are two of the bad boys in a game that is doing everything short of locking players in their bedrooms at night to protect its image. Part of the rationale for its sensitivity towards protecting the AFL "brand", a corporate term footy fans have become accustomed to hearing in recent years, is that the national game's body wants to avoid as best it can the calamities that beset rugby league a few years ago.

Until recently, rugby league and its players were the subject of screaming headlines as yet another boofhead spoke to a member of the fairer sex in impolite terms or tried to place a hand at inside centre. If a league player found someone willing to accommodate his carnal wishes, he often invited his team-mates along.

The revelation of Australian rugby league's apparent culture of group sex, in which a series of team-mates has sex with one woman (two on a good night), sparked national outrage (and not a little intrigue). Mums and dads declared they would never let their sons play a game with such a culture.

To the credit of rugby league, it appears to have cleaned up its act. With a team from the distinctly non-rugby league city of Melbourne at the top of the ladder, it's even thriving, with better crowds and coverage than the sport has enjoyed in recent memory. The absence of screaming headlines about Viking-like escapades has helped matters.

And so to the football code with no concerns - or certainly few concerns - in the off-field trouble department. Australian rugby union was tipped into mild scandal when Wallabies trouble magnet Wendell Sailor tested positive for cocaine. But apart from that, the only scandal has been the shameless selection of players with hyphenated surnames.

Rugby union in Australia is a middle-class game, with a large slice of players and supporters at the extreme end of the middle-class spectrum, hence the two names when one should do. Rugby league is furiously working-class, hence the predilection of many players to engage in uncouth activities, while Australian football, because of its dominance of the sporting audience in the southern states, has elements of both working-class and middle-class cultures.

AFL players generally, however, are working-class, and it's these players from blue-collar backgrounds who tend to find themselves in awkward situations.

The crowd at the Melbourne Cricket Ground for Saturday's rugby union Test between Australia and New Zealand was better dressed, with noticeably nicer hair and nicer skin, than the crowds who stream into the stadium for AFL games. My cousin put the cultures of the two games in perspective when he reported that the punters in the nearby strippers' bar before the rugby match were models of good behaviour.

"They were much less feral," he said, comparing the rugby fans to your average Australian football strippers' audience.

Once in the MCG, these fans saw a game worth travelling for, which was just as well, considering a good proportion of the crowd of 79,000 had flown down from the rugby states of New South Wales and Queensland.

After a first half in which New Zealand failed to take advantage of their dominance, Australia, led by inspirational captain Stirling Mortlock (that's a very rugby union first name), played a blinding last 20 minutes to steal the match. It was the Wallabies' first win over the All Blacks for three years and did the usual trick, with another World Cup approaching, of sowing doubt in the Kiwis' minds before meeting the Wallabies in the biggest tournament.

Early on Sunday morning, according to news reports, a German tourist was dragged into a Melbourne lane, prompting the woman to scream for help. A West Australian rugby fan, who was over from Perth for the Wallabies match, responded by dragging the attacker off the woman and landing a few blows for justice.

Given the early-morning shooting in Melbourne a fortnight ago, it was a welcome piece of good news. Even in matters of the street, it's rugby union that comes out on top.