Even the name cage fighting brings up images of animal-like no-holds-barred contest for life or death, and when I saw the photos in the Herald from a weekend tournament of cage fighting in Newcastle there didn't appear to be any rules. Fighters were shown appearing to punch crouching or prone opponents, and a reading of what passes as the rules for cage fighting established that punching a crouching or prone opponent is a fine thing. Indeed, punching a head that is on the ground is a technique that has its own name, ground and pound. Using a knee to stomp the body of a prone opponent is fine too, and imagine for a moment the injury that could be caused by such a low act. Kneeing the head of a crouching opponent is good too, but only if he has no more than two points, say two knees, on the ground. Stomping on the head is outlawed by the rules of the organisation that staged Newcastle's weekend tournament but not of a major NSW cage-fighting organiser I found on the net, Cage Fighting Championship. Bending, and perhaps breaking, fingers and toes is against the rules unless you bend or break at least three at once. There are no blood rules, by the way.

Cage fighting, sometimes referred to as Mixed Martial Arts and sometimes defined as separate from that discipline, came to Australia from the US, where it is banned in many states, some time after Foxtel began showing clips of cage fighting in the US. Early this year it came under the regulation of the new NSW Combat Sports Authority, which is within the Department of Sport and Recreation and which says on its website that generally it accepts the rules of the governing body of the sport. It appears to have accepted the event's rules even though there does not seem to be a governing body.