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When we wonder what is ruining AFL football, we often ask whether it’s the rules or the umpires. But this is no chicken and egg situation, for the rules committee are making a farce of our great game.
For anyone who watches a lot of football, both are factors that combine every round to make the viewing experience an amalgamation of frustration, bewilderment and anger. It’s utterly dispiriting.
The umpires are always the first to feel the wrath of rage-filled fans, operating at ground zero as they are, but they arguably cop the rawest deal of all due to having to implement ever-changing rules.
Of course, this doesn’t compensate for their pompousness, an ego-driven need to insert themselves into the game and the inability to shut up for longer than a few seconds.
Why are they constantly talking to the players after every decision, despite rarely being asked for clarification?
Any player lining up for goal also has them chattering in their ear about how long is left for what seems like the entire time.
Just shut up!
Whenever there’s a hint of a wrestle or some one-on-one push and shove, there’s the ump in the middle of it. “Don’t go high”, “Keep it down”, “Your team has the ball, don’t give away a free.”
Please.
Simply pay a free kick if you think there’s one there (preferably only in the case of a broken jaw), or better yet, leave them alone to sort it out, and let the video review panel make any reports they deem necessary on Monday.
In the Carlton v Melbourne game at the MCG yesterday, Eddie Betts marked the ball about 40 metres out, with the final siren going seconds later to the notice of everyone on and at the ground.
Yet, while Betts was lining up, the umpire in control felt compelled to twice tell him that he couldn’t play on.
Firstly, did he think Betts was going to baulk the man on the mark, take three bounces and roost home a torpedo from the goal-square while everyone around him was shaking hands?
Secondly, just shut up!
And why, match after match, round after round, year after year, do umpires continue to get sucked in and pay soft free kicks for off-the-ball incidents when two players barely touch each other, but one drops to the ground as if shot?
Here’s a clue umps – if Hayden Ballantye, Alex Fasolo, Stephen Milne, Alwyn Davey, Steve Johnson, Michael Osborne, Lindsay Thomas, Jake King, Ashton Hams or anyone of their ilk are involved, regardless if they’re lying on the ground or not, it’s 95% certain they started it, and did worse than was done to them.
If you never pay a free kick to any of those players, they’ll stop doing it, and you’ll end up on the right side of fair. Win-win.
After each round of matches, we then have to endure the ludicrousness of Jeff Gieschen being unleashed on a suspecting public to vindicate the obvious wrongs the rest of us have clearly identified. While he’s nothing more than a caricature now, doubtless his job is made harder by the rules committee.
I don’t even know where to start with those that have shaped the rules of our national game.
Many rules and interpretations make me want to throw things through the nearest window. But the most infuriating is seeing a perfectly legitimate tackle get penalised because the tackler ends up in-the-back.
Often the contact is incidental, more often than that it’s unavoidable, and almost always the player with the ball throws themselves forward to ensure the free.
If I had my way, a player would need his spine snapped in three places before getting a free kick under those circumstances, and even then I’d expect the ump to think twice about it.
The latest rule drawing the ire of lifelong fans is pushing in a marking contest, which was brought to the fore after Ben Reid’s disallowed mark on ANZAC Day.
You could pick out one hundred similar marking contests over any given weekend where nothing is paid, which only makes it more infuriating when one is plucked out.
Every footy fan who saw the free kick paid against Scott Thompson for his fingernail on David Hale in the Adelaide v Hawthorn game on Saturday wept on the inside. No doubt some Crows fans were also crying on the outside, as the decision was at a crucial stage of the last quarter when Adelaide was gathering momentum.
It was a disgraceful decision that surely even the vaudevillian Gieschen couldn’t agree with. But what does it say about our rules that the umpire felt the decision was the right one?
How have we let football come to this?
We’ve also got the sliding rule which prevents players from going in hard and low with their bodies on the line, simply because someone broke an ankle under those circumstances once.
Richmond’s Steve Morris got rubbed out for a week for rough conduct on Collingwood’s Jamie Elliot in Round 4. Rough conduct! Fair enough, a bit of Morris’ shoulder found a minor piece of Elliot’s chin because the Pie wasn’t aware of his surroundings, but how should this be anything other than a free kick for high contact?
The AFL seems to want to remove any hint of danger out of the game, even though it is the very aspect that players and spectators love the most.
To finish off the weekend, we had Luke Tapscott reported, presumably because of a reckless and high bump on Kade Simpson when both were attacking the ball. The only problem was that Tapscott was neither reckless, nor got Simpson high. Replays clearly show the bump to be in the side.
What this means is that the umpire not only paid a free kick, but also reported a player for something that he did not see. Like a funny movie involving the Wayans brothers, you can’t see something that doesn’t exist.
So, in summary, we’ve got rules that are taking the hardness out of the game, interpretations that change by the day to reward the soft and weak, topped off by umpires guessing instead of paying only what they 100% see.
I saw the following on Twitter after the Tapscott report: “That wasn’t even a free kick, let alone a reportable act. The game I once loved is dead to me.”
There’s a few of us who may not be far behind him.