Memo to Demetriou, Evans, Gieschen and the M&Ms:
If you truly want the game to flow and eradicate stoppages then try the novel concept of paying free kicks when they're there. Yep, it will mean more frees paid but guess what that will do? It will get the ball moving away from the pack and produce more individual contests around the ground. Instead of sitting on the outside of the ever increasing and ugly pack forming flapping your arms and calling play on, how about paying prior opportunity correctly - you would be amazed at how many packs it will prevent from forming in the first place.
Appears I'm not alone in my thinking:
You've got a whistle, blow the b$%@&! thingCharles Happell
Written on Monday, 10 June 2013 20:03
It's difficult to take the negative side in a footy debate when, appearing for the affirmative on the other team, are the rather prominent voices of James Hird, Mick Malthouse and Nathan Buckley - coaches of Victoria's three biggest AFL clubs.
All three said they loved the way Friday night's Carltion-Essendon match was umpired. They loved it because the umps put the whistle away and let the players slug it out and do their thing. They had ''let the game go''.
Hird, basking in the glow of the Bombers' flukey win, said: "I felt the game was umpired really fairly and the obvious ones were given. That's how we want the game umpired."
Malthouse's moustache stopped bristling long enough for him to add: "They umpired a terrific game of football and I will take the punt that I won't get fined in saying that the quality of umpiring today was outstanding given the surface and it allowed the game to be played with two good football sides going at each other."
Well, as the first speaker for the negative, I was at the game and I say that assertion is absolute baloney.
Countless free kicks weren't paid that should have been paid - and would have been paid even at the start of this season. It was a free-for-all and, don't be deceived by the close result, an eyesore, the contest largely devoid of any individual highlights.
The umpires on Friday night blew their whistle only 17 times to pay a free kick. Seventeen times in game that went for 110 minutes - at the rate of one free every 6.5 minutes. Seventeen times in a game where the contest was fierce, where bodies were thrown into contested situations and where backmen were often holding on to forwards off the ball.
Only once was a player deemed to have illegally disposed of the ball.
Yet the free-kick average per game at the start of the season hovered around the mid-40s. So what gives? If umps boss, Jeff Gieschen, wasn't on a six-week mid-season holiday, perhaps we could ask him.
Two Carlton forwards were, from my neutral position, pushed square in the back in the frenetic final few minutes - Jarrad Waite was one of them - but the umps kept their whistles steadfastly by their sides. And, reinforcing the theory that they're happy to pay frees in the middle of the ground (occasionally) but rarely in front of goal, then they paid a soft one to Paddy Ryder at a boundary throw-in.
There's a voluminous book of rules relating to the indigenous game, yet the umpires either off their own bat, or because they're instructed to, choose to penalise players who break these rules only in the most egregious cases. The rules are now applied selectively, so an 80% infringement might attract a penalty but a 60% one might be called play on.
And fewer free kicks only cultivates that blight on the modern game: scrimmages, stoppages, packs and stacks on the mill. Over 10 years until 2008, the average number of field bounces in season deciders was 27; in the past four years, it has risen to 47. In 2012, there were 51. It's ugly and, with fewer free kicks being paid, it's only getting uglier.
And it here that I introduce the second speaker for the affirmative, Mr Tim Lane, who wrote a piece in the Sunday Age last October which ought to be required reading for Gieschen, his umpires and all on the Rules Committee.
''In the 1970 Grand Final, (sole field umpire) Don Jolley paid 90 free kicks (which may include frees for out of bounds on the full). In this year's grand final, 31 free kicks (not including ''out on the full'') were awarded in a game with indubitably more tackling than was the case 42 years ago. In the 1996 grand final, 19 free kicks - about one every six minutes - were awarded. Does anyone seriously believe the same standard of player protection was brought to that game as to the classic of 26 years earlier?
''Apologists for today's relentless defensive, stoppage-oriented football argue that, in the past, too many inconsequential free kicks were paid. But Jolley and his peers did not just protect the ball player, they protected - and preserved - a particular form of the game.
''Yet still the AFL football brains trust refuses to acknowledge liberal umpiring as a reason for the escalating problem of pack formation.''
And, finally I call on Mr Pat Smith, from The Australian, as third speaker for the negative. Smith wrote a column in today's paper headlined: ''You can throw out rulebook ... the umpires have'' in which he, too, expressed dismay at the paltry number of frees paid on Friday night.
''What the umpires are doing now is relaxing the interpretation of every rule. We are playing a different game in round 11 than we did in round one. That is so damning of the football department at the AFL and the autonomy of the umpiring arm of the league,'' Smith wrote.
''Paying only blatant and eye-boggling breaches of the rules is unsustainable. There is no standard to judge the rules by if they are not to be strictly adhered to. A push-in-the-back free should not be determined by the force but by the action itself. Free-wheeling interpretation will soon lead to confusion that will erode the umpires' credibility and authority.
''All of this means the AFL no longer has rules for its football game, merely broad outlines from which the umpires will adjudicate our game. Chaos is just a whistle - or rather lack of one - away.
''So from all of this we can correctly deduce that the umpiring in the early rounds of the season was poor and now it is good. And we can also presume the rule that, say, does not allow a player to push his opponent in the back is, in fact, just an ambit claim.''
So with that, we rest our case. Doubtless we'll get drowned out by the mindless chorus of ''just let the game go'', but unless something is done to rein in this dire trend then expect chaos, and ugliness, to ensue.
http://www.backpagelead.com.au/afl/9714-youve-got-a-whistle-blow-the-ba-thing
