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Over the past few weeks there have been some strange umpiring decisions which might make us wonder if we haven’t moved to a parallel universe.
Last week we saw a player on top of another who had the ball and no free was given. The reason given by the umpire? “You have to lay a tackle before it can be holding the ball.”
If a player is sitting on another and has his hand on him, I would say he is tackled.
Friday night we saw a free given to Collingwood’s Jarryd Blair from which he kicked his third goal. The Carlton player penalised was holding his position under the ball against a smaller player. A ridiculous decision.
In another fiasco, after the ball was kicked through the goals the field umpire asked the goal umpire and both boundary umpires if they had seen the ball touched. They all replied they hadn’t so the field umpire stated, “Then we have to give the lower score.”
I have always been under the impression that it is a goal unless someone definitely saw it touched using the benefit of the doubt rule.
How can we say it’s not a goal because we didn’t see it touched? Doesn’t make sense. (As it turns out the ball was touched but that is totally irrelevant.)
Several interpretations of rules in the final quarter of Friday nights’ game were also highly suspicious.
It is bad enough that the AFL continually changes the rules of our game so that players, umpires and fans are confused!
Must we now also be subjected to any weird interpretation that individual umpires wish to place on those rules?
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