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What's happened to holding the ball?

The Swans host the Pies in Friday night action. (AAP Image/Dan Himbrechts)
Roar Guru
25th July, 2016
28

How freaking hard is it to pay the holding the ball rule?

The number of times a player drops the ball or throws it away when tackled and play is allowed to go on is now an epidemic. It has nothing to do with umpiring positioning. Often, they’re right there, right in front of the action, but nothing happens.

On top of that, the commentators seem now to have a different interpretation of the holding the ball rule. How often do they defend the ball-carrier by saying that they haven’t had ‘prior opportunity’?

Does ‘prior opportunity’ count as a qualification when the ball is dropped? When it’s thrown? When it’s not legally disposed of?

Watch the game and pay specific attention to it. This is a challenge to you. Be objective. Watch the game and count the amount of the times the holding the ball rule is blatantly disregarded.

It won’t be some dismissible number. It’ll be pervasive. Any why? How did the implementation of this rule devolve so that it became this oddity?

Football is a simple game. Get ball. Pass ball to teammate. Kick goal. And while this is going on, the opposition’s duty is to get the ball back. One of the ways they are meant to be able to do so is through tackling – a fundamental of the game for as long as I remember. But tacklers are being undermined by an interpretation that has become so loose that awarding the free is becoming the exception.

It seems such a black and white rule: when tackled, the ball-carrier needs to dispose of the ball legally by hand (read: a handball, not a throw) or by foot. That’s it. If they drop the ball and it hits the ground, if they try to kick it and they miss the ball so it hits the ground, it should even be if the player falls in the tackle and plants the ball on the ground, it’s dropping the ball.

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It shouldn’t matter whether they’ve had a prior opportunity or not. Prior opportunity was brought in to penalise players who’d had a chance to dispose of it, hadn’t, and then were tackled. Then they could be penalised even if the ball was pinned to them.

Good: get rid of the ball legally. Bad: get rid of the ball illegally.

We often hear the complaint of large packs around the ball, that the game’s become like rugby with scrums and hideous congestion. This is one of the reasons: imprecise disposals.

The ball pops out from a tackle that should’ve been rewarded. Then everybody converges on the loose ball. One of the AFL’s attempts to address this has been penalising when somebody dives on top of the ball and drags it in – it doesn’t matter if that player is trapped under four opponents and it’s physically impossible for him to move, let alone get the ball out. Ping him. But reward an actual legitimate tackle?

It feels like somebody has wanted to dilute this rule because once a free is awarded (as an aside, a free which would actually clear congestion immediately) play stops, and we can’t have play stopping, can we?

We don’t want the ball going out of bounds (thus pay deliberate as much as possible, so players try to keep the ball in), players can kick in immediately following a behind (whereas previously they had to wait for the goal umpire to finish waving their flags), and any time players have a pause (like after a mark) they’re hurried on.

So keep the ball in motion.

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This disregard for holding the ball has been going on for a while and it’s not questioned the way it should be. It’s just another ambiguity in the rules, like not questioning when ‘hands in the back’ is applied, or the lotto behind a ruck infringement.

We are programmed, as fans, not to question, to accept the quirkiness behind these rules, to grow conditioned to accepting the way the game unfolds.

You have to wonder if, at some point, some mandate has come down from the AFL. After all, every change they’ve ever implemented has been designed to keep the game moving at all costs.

And perhaps ‘holding the ball’ is just another casualty.

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