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AFL umpires boss Jeff Geischen must be stood down, as too should the rules committee and all AFL employees responsible for the implementation of the rules in recent years. It’s that simple.
Why you ask? This nonsense has gone too far is why.
Round 7 is full of intriguing match-ups. The season thus far has rarely failed to deliver, and the same could be said for the previous few years.
Here’s the problem – no one’s talking about the footy.
To the detriment of our great game, the primary focus of the public and the media is on the inconsistencies and confusion we all share over what is a mark and what is not.
What’s worse is that this is nothing new. Three weeks ago we were obsessing about some of the nonsensical decisions relating to the sliding rule.
Every year in recent memory the changing of a rule by the AFL, or worse, the unofficial changing of a rule by Geischen’s umpiring department, has resulted in precisely what we’re seeing today – the focus being on the lawmakers and adjudicators instead of the footy itself.
Jeff Geischen must be the first to go. He has consistently taken the liberty of unofficially changing the rules of the game.
The umpiring department’s role is to interpret the rules implemented by the AFL. Once they have set that standard, their primary responsibility is to adjudicate the rule with the highest possible level of consistency.
Under Geischen’s watch they’ve failed badly on both fronts.
Over the last few years we’ve seen the umpires completely change their interpretation of many rules.
Holding the ball against the man diving on the footy is nowhere near as strict as it was a couple of years ago, while deliberate out of bounds is umpired far more strictly.
The ‘hands in the back’ rule was umpired to the letter of the law when first introduced, now days a much more sensible interpretation is being enforced.
The reality is Geischen and the umpiring department made monumental changes to these rules, without having the authority to do so.
This latest marking debacle goes to the heart of the umpiring department’s inability to correctly interpret the rules.
As the rule relating to contact in a marking contest is written, it prohibits:
(Rule 15.4.5)
(d) pushes, bumps, blocks, holds an opposition Player or deliberately interferes with the arms of an opposition Player, who is in the act of Marking or attempting to Mark the football;
(e) pushes, bumps, holds or blocks an opposition Player when the football is further than 5 metres away from the opposition Player or is out of play;
Yet on Monday night Geischem appeared on On The Couch explaining to Gerard Healy that players are in fact allowed to push in a marking contest, provided they don’t fully extend their arms.
If they push their opponent aside with bent arms, the umpires won’t penalise them.
Where exactly in the rule does it say anything about that?
Once again Gieschem is guilty of over ruling the laws of the AFL and implementing his own version.
All this leads to is frustration and mass confusion. Collingwood coach Nathan Buckley responded to the latest changes.
“Right now, from what I gather, a half push is OK but a full push is not acceptable,” he said.
“I don’t know what an 80 percent push (looks like), how that’s going to be adjudicated? … it makes it very difficult to understand how you can make any contact at all.”
While Geischen insults the intelligence of the fans with his continued insistence that the rule has always been umpired the same, 94 percent of the 1700 fans replying to a Fairfax poll said they believed the marking rule was being umpired differently to last year.
The rules committee and AFL lawmakers are far from blameless in all of this too. Constant chopping and changing of the rules year after year, often with no discernible benefit to the game. Change for the sake of change.
The wording of the prohibited contact in a marking contest rule, among other recent additions, is clearly unsatisfactory.
Thankfully up until this year no one really noticed how bad it was, largely because the umpiring department essentially chose to ignore it and allow varying degrees of pushing anyway.
Now that they’re getting closer to umpiring the law as it’s written, it becomes obvious what a terrible job was done penning it.
As Gold Coast coach Guy McKenna put it, “if the marking rule was implemented as it’s been written, marking would technically become a non-contact part of the game.”
It’s clear that the overwhelming majority of fans, coaches and players alike are frustrated and annoyed with the changing and technical nature of the rules of late.
North Melbourne champion Glen Archer summed up the feelings of many when he recently said, “I don’t know what’s going on. I have to turn the TV off half the time.”
How did it get to the point that the individuals responsible for this mess became completely unaccountable?
The footy world is clearly dissatisfied – at what point do these kinds of results have consequences for the people responsible?
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