Umpires’ intuition or x-ray vision?

We here at AussieRulesBlog have long held that umpires make some decisions based on guesswork. We had intuited this on the basis of a lifetime’s worth of football spectating.

 

Last Saturday evening, watching the last quarter of the North-Essendon game from an unaccustomed seven rows behind the fence, we saw Mark McVeigh fighting hard to gain possession of the ball and pulled to the ground with his back to the umpire. We know this because we were right on the umpire’s line of sight, so we were seeing pretty much exactly what the umpire was seeing.

 

We couldn’t see the ball. We didn’t know whether McVeigh still had the ball or whether a North opponent had taken it from him as they were surrounded by as many as fifteen players and buried under another four or five, with McVeigh still lying on the ground with his back to the umpire.

 

So the picture here is a confused tangle of bodies where we cannot be sure of the location — or possession — of the ball.

 

You know already, dear Reader, what happened next, don’t you? The umpire slowly brought the whistle to his mouth, blew a long blast and then made that awful sweeping gesture to indicate a free kick against McVeigh for not having disposed of the ball correctly.

 

So, the umpire either guessed, or is possessed of x-ray vision.

 

Either way, it’s not appropriate to make decisions on that basis.