Tinkering with laws of the game a mixed blessing

News released a few days before the commencement of the pre-season competition that some new rules would be trialled has both positive and negative aspects.

It’s a big ask for players to play to one rule or interpretation during the pre-season, and then another when the home and away rounds commence. AussieRulesBlog doesn’t have a better suggestion for trialling changes, but we regard this as an unfortunate consequence of that process.

Empowering boundary umpires to pay free kicks is, in our view, an essentially poorly-conceived notion. There are already considerable problems for players with three interpretations of rules in each game. Why would we want to add a further four interpretations?

The number of off-the-ball free kicks being paid appears to have escalated over recent years. As we have previously noted, television and radio audiences are reasonably well served with either direct audio feed from the officials or a staff member monitoring the direct audio feed and relaying those details to the caller. The paying punter sitting at the ground is quite another matter however.

We have recently taken to simply watching the game rather than watching and listening to the radio calls with all their hyperbole and sensationalism. For those of us taking this option, it’s often quite mystifying why play is stopped, why a free kick was paid and what it was paid for. The AFL seems hell-bent on making changes, but providing better information to paying patrons doesn’t seem to feature on their list of priorities.

We do think the threat of a penalty for players dragging the ball underneath an opponent is a good move. We are heartily sick of players laying under a pack of opponents who are holding the ball to that player being free kicked for not having got rid of the ball. It’s clear to everybody except The Giesch that the player isn’t in possession.

With this new rule, the player in possession makes an attempt to get rid of the ball — no free kick. If the opponent drags the ball back to the player, free kick against the opponent. Good stuff!

Finally, the advantage rule has been a disaster area almost from its inception. We’ve all seen scenarios where almost everyone stops “on the whistle” as they’ve been trained to do and one lucky player has the ball serendipitously fall to them, in space, and there’s a collective groan as the umpire signals advantage.

This trial change seems to remove that gap between the whistle and the umpire’s realisation of advantage. Players will be aware that the ball remains live. What remains to be seen is how The Giesch instructs his blokes to interpret all these factors. When does impeding the player with the free kick finish and advantage begin? Yes, yet another grey area.

As we began, there are mixed blessings.