Protect the bounce

With less than two days before the real stuff begins, AussieRulesBlog wants to pre-empt the virtually inevitable call for AFL to do away with umpires bouncing our oval ball.

 

Over the last couple of weekends we’ve taken the opportunity of a lack of AFL to watch a couple of Melbourne Storm games. As Melburnians, we are certainly proud of the way Cameron Smith, Billy Slater, Cooper Cronk and the boys have been following Craig Bellamy’s instructions. We’re not to sure about the News Ltd ownership of the Storm since we have scant regard for Citizen Murdoch, but that’s another post!

 

The thing that we’ve noticed most about the NRL games we’ve seen is the brutality — in a good way, if that’s possible — of simply running at a line of opponents expecting to be hit. We cannot help but admire the courage of every player on the park.

 

But then there’s a scrum. Well, if a modern NRL scrum isn’t the most pathetic sight, we don’t know what is. The players in the scrum stand in a rather desultory fashion while the ball is fed into the scrum from very close to its back. There’s virtually no contest for the ball. It’s simply shovelled to the back of the scrum and then passed away.

 

Compare an NRL scrum and a Super Rugby scrum. Goodness, what a contrast. An NRL scrum looks the most useless and out-of-place exercise.

 

Why is AussieRulesBlog spending valuable time talking about the British Bulldog mob? It illustrates how the spectacle of the game can be destroyed by a seemingly insignificant element.

 

In AFL terms, we fear that the field umpire’s bounce could go the way of competitive NRL scrums and diminish the unique spectacle of our game. Let’s not bend to the cries of those who would replace the bounce with a basketball tip-off.

 

We think the AFL and the umpiring department — wait for it . . . — have got the bounce just about right, in the sense that a bounce going outside the large circle is recalled and thrown up. We retain the mystique of the umpire bouncing, we maintain a reasonable degree of fairness by allowing the space of the big circle for the bounce to come down, and we restart from obviously unfair bounces.

 

There are many uniquely wonderful aspects of our game that should be protected — physicality, high marking, running and bouncing, goal umpires with flags, and umpires bouncing the ball at stoppages.