There seems to be a wee bit of concern about congestion in and around these parts and enough people seem to be worried enough to try and open up the bowels of the game, with the AFL leading the charge.
Ok, it seems ironical to deploy another article aimed at opening up the game into an already congested space of ideas, plans and wild-eyed schemes to do the same.
This one I think though, hits the congestion at the source and fits well with both the “spirit of the game” (whatever that is exactly) and a potentially moderate adjustment.
For a while it has struck me as odd that a player who has taken a mark can be grappled for a period after they have been awarded the mark and impeded from playing on.
Why this is allowed to occur? Surely it is a mindset thing and has been treated differently via umpire’s mandates over the years.
If we (a hypothetical we) want to clear congestion, why not promote every opportunity to play on as quickly as possible.
There are on average about 180 marks per game so far this year. If we turbocharged the possibilities to play on at the marking (and free kick too even, why not?), it would present much more opportunities to move the ball quickly out of an area and make the space around the contest harder to congest.
Sure they’ve done this with the side zones idea, but I’d argue they’ve targeted the wrong part of the equation.
The idea of the side zones has become a bit too much of an obscure-half-arsery to keep front of mind for all concerned (what with aforementioned creeping and groping from opposition players allowed to go unchecked).
To be fair though this rule was actually one of the more successful measures at freeing up the game in 2016, playing no small part in allowing a young Bulldogs side to speed move their way to an unexpected premiership.
But umpires don’t seem to get it now and a lot of players surely don’t (although to be fair it could be like a lot of rules its intent is lost over time).
To me there could be more advantage philosophically, given to taking a mark (and similarly to a free kick). It kind of keeps it more front of mind… “ahh, a mark’s a big deal, clear the space…”
The minimum of this is to ban any impeding of the player, in anyway, once they have taken the mark. This would include any attempts to stop the player who has taken the mark from handballing or kicking the ball. Just get out of the way.
But as I said, the no-impeding is the bare minimum. There is more that could be considered and here is where it gets funky and not for the stodgy.
A further step to pour on the advantage and speed up play is to require the opposing player on the mark to step back (or stop) a specified distance from where the mark/free kick was actually taken (I’m going to start calling this setback mark a set-mark in here from now on).
The set-mark distance could vary anywhere between 1m (minimal), to 2m-5m or even 10m from the mark itself. With this change all of a sudden the marker and their team can launch an all out attack, with feckless abandon, clear the space and savagely pierce any zone before it’s assembled.
If you were into it (and I’d suggest you try to imagine this weekend games when the man running up to the mark has to stop a metre or five away and not creep over the mark and pretend he doesn’t know where the actual mark is taken, also the marker doesn’t need to take time to back-peddle some kicking space), you could also have a (gasp) circular zone (1m, 2m or 5m, take your pick) around the mark, where the marking team (and his teammates) can play on unimpeded until they have cleared the zone.
But to assure you I haven’t gone completely mad, there’s a few modifiers to be thrown into the pot.
First the penalty. Initially at least, a 50m penalty is way too much. They could do a gradual increase starting with a 15m penalty to a 25m after a few weeks, depending on how things were going.
Another option is for players who accidentally breech the zone (gack), require that they not be allowed to be active in contesting the play until it has left the area (so they con follow their man, but not tackle them until the ball is kicked/handballed clear).
You’d also want to speed up the play, so if you went with the set-mark option, after a 5-10 second delay the umpire could allow the opposing player to come up to the original mark. But I’m not so sure about this, very optional.
“Wouldn’t this just have teams short-pass kick their way up the ground?” I hear you say.
That’s why they could increase the length of a markable kick to something like 20-30m (also helping to quash any Hawthornoia that this would be a gateway for them to 9m chip back to the top).
This would encourage longer kicking and really reward more contested marking too. Further enshrining the mark and a likely outcome of having more contested marking.
All of a sudden players like Jeremy Howe, Liam Ryan, Charlie Curnow would be even more valuable assets to their teams than they already are. Recruiters would give a higher priority to players who can speccy or clunk it. We can dream anyways.
There’s probably more bits and pieces that could be added to it and it could be bolstered by quicker ball-ups and throw-ins to boot.
So what do you think?
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