Umpires and tribunals are a necessary part of our game. Without them, the game we Aussie Rules aficionados love would be little more than a brawl in a paddock. So, with that responsibility, it’s verging on disastrous that footy officialdom is so out of touch with practical reality.

Few would argue that the out of bounds on the full and deliberate out of bounds rules have generally improved the game as a spectacle. Few also would argue that there are countless occasions in each game where players ‘deliberately’ take the ball over the boundary line where there is no practical means for them to stop or otherwise keep the ball in play.

Jeff Gieschen’s spin on the Montagna kick last Thursday is as pure an example as could be imagined of defending the indefensible. If that kick is penalised, then every player who crosses the boundary while ‘fumbling’ the ball must also be penalised.

To add to the AFL’s woes, the MRP decides that Matthew Scarlett’s headcrashing elbow is a "legitimate spoiling action" that caused "accidental" high contact. For goodness sake! The only accidental contact was the contact Scarlett made with the ball!

Worse, the MRP’s analysis of Scarlett’s actions brings into question the whole rationale for free kicks paid for incidental contact. Surely these too should be deemed “accidental” and free of penalty?

Both the MRP and the umpiring department have utterly lost the confidence of the paying customer. The game may appear to be healthy after a bumper round of tight and interesting games, but umpiring and tribunal decisions that defy common logic risk the game’s ongoing health.

Release the Giesch!!!  . . .and the MRP!

AussieRulesBlog has noticed in a couple of this week’s games that umpires’ boss Jeff Gieschen has ordained a new and devastating interpretation of holding the man — well devastating for the Adelaide Crows anyway!

It’s not that long ago — four or five weeks? — that a player making a tackle was penalised if the player he tackled was held for a micro second after ‘disposing’ of the ball. Well, that interpretation has been well and truly shelved.

Tonight, the Crows were denied three crucial free kicks in the midfield in the last minutes of the game as they pressed to extend their hard-won lead over the Blues. In each case, the Adelaide player was slung in the tackle after the ball had spilled loose. Not to put too fine a point on it, the Crows were probably cost the game by these non-decisions. Clearly, by their expressions and gestures, the Adelaide players expected free kicks.

Thank the umpires Blues fans, because they got you the game.

Regular readers will be aware that AussieRulesBlog fights for consistency in umpiring. We don’t care if the decision is wrong, as long as it is interpreted consistently the same way every game and every week of the season.

Instead, what we get under the Gieschen Ascendency is constantly-changing interpretations leaving players, coaches and fans utterly bewildered.

What is there left to say? You guessed it! RELEASE THE GIESCH!!!!!!!

This time inspired by one of the participating coaches, the now-annual discussion over who should participate in Melbourne’s iconic Anzac Day AFL fixture is on again.

Regular readers will be aware of AussieRulesBlog’s allegiance to Essendon, so let’s get that out on the table at the outset.

Firstly, it should be acknowledged by all that a large part of the mystique attached to this annual Collingwood v. Essendon fixture is the sight and sounds of a packed-out MGC. There is something incredibly moving about standing in a packed-out stadium and being able to hear a pin drop. There’s also something about the roar of forty thousand fans acclaiming a goal or demanding a free kick.

Only a few other potential matchups could offer the likelihood of a similarly-sized attendance — say, 80k and above — and, for the vast majority of cases, they involve at least one of Collingwood or Essendon.

What’s more, Anzac Day crowd numbers are stratospheric regardless of the form and ladder positions of the Magpies and Bombers. Few, if any, clubs could boast that their crowd numbers held up through poor on-field form. Just to reinforce that point, attendances for the past eleven Anzac Day games (2000 onwards) are: 88390, 83905, 84894, 62589*, 57294*, 70033*, 91234, 90508, 88999, 84829 and 90070 (* during reconstruction at the MCG).

Would we want to see an iconic fixture honouring and celebrating Anzac spirit and the sacrifices of our service personnel over the past 130 years with thirty or forty thousand empty seats . . .?

This particular game transcends football. It performs a much larger social and cultural role and both Collingwood and Essendon understand their social responsibility in the matter.

Anzac Day should be above petty football jealousies.

Campbell Brown’s brainsnap has served as the exclamation point to a litany of Match Review Panel misjudgements over the past five or so seasons.

It’s worth revisiting the claims that were made for the MRP process when it was introduced. It would, we were told, remove the subjectivity that had been criticised in the old Tribunal system and replace it with documented certainty.

Well, with five years’ experience, AussieRulesBlog thinks we can now say, with certainty, “Hogwash!”

Assuredly, there were no (publicly-documented) guidelines that the Tribunal used in coming to its judgements. The Match Review Panel has documented (but publicly-inaccessible) guidelines for severity of contact, intent and protection of head and groin. That’s all very well, but the assessment of incidents and application of those guidelines scales to them is just as subjective as anything that came out of the tribunal.

How else to explain that Campbell Brown’s strike on Callum Ward was rated reckless rather than intentional? As has been pointed out in a number of public fora, this change would still have seen Brown receive only a two-week penalty.

It’s fair to say that the bulk of MRP judgements are met with knowing nods. Those that they get wrong, however, are met with gales of scorn and ridicule. There’s more than a little of The Little Girl who Lives Down the Lane about the MRP — when it’s good, it’s very good, but when it’s bad . . .

There can never be a wholly objective process and it would be silly to demand one. What we can demand is a system that more accurately reflects the football community’s expectations. And we can demand that the AFL demonstrate its seriousness about issues like staging by making sure the body charged with implementing it does so according to the publicly-released guidelines.

So, how about it Adrian and Andrew? There can be no doubt that the MRP, in its current form, is found wanting when it is most needed to perform.

You know the old aphorism? The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Well, this weekend, Campbell Brown confirmed the truth of the aphorism, for the Brown clan at least, if such confirmation was ever in doubt.

Campbell’s father, Malcolm, was a bear of a man and played his football on the edge — of sanity and controversy. “Big bad Mal” was bigger and badder than Barry Hall has ever dreamt of being and was on a permanent hair trigger when he crossed the white line. Not that Mal wasn’t a gifted athlete and footballer. He was both and didn’t need to throw his weight around to be very effective, but he seemed to know no other way.

It would have been surprising therefore had Mal’s boy Campbell not been at least a little hyper-aggressive.

There’s never been any question of Campbell’s disdain for physical danger, but his whiteline fever has certainly had more than a little of his father about it.

There was a very good article under Campbell’s byline in the Age on Saturday discussing the development and expectations of the Suns. The same person — apparently — then said on television on Sunday, after elbowing Bulldog Callum Ward to the face twenty or more metres off the ball,

''That's the way I play and if I didn't play that way, I wouldn't be playing AFL footy. . . I don't think I've got anything to apologise for. . .”

It’s hard to imagine that the Suns’ hierarchy isn’t regretting the decision to recruit Brown. Aggression at the ball is one thing — a cold-blooded strike behind the play is quite another.

We feel sorry for the Suns players who felt obliged to support Brown when other Bulldogs players remonstrated with him after the incident. AussieRulesBlog, in those Suns players’ place, would have stood back and applauded any Bulldog player who managed to thump Brown.

It is crystal clear to all but Brown that there is no place in football in 2011 for him.

Watching 2011 AFL games, the inequities of player-initiated advantage are  plain for all to see. Advantage per se is a problematic concept to implement in Aussie rules anyway, but it’s definitely been taken a step too far.

To understand the inequities, it’s important to analyse how advantage works currently. The umpire blows his whistle for a free kick. If the ball has spilled to a member of the team receiving the free kick, and the umpire judges that the movement of the ball has been continuous, then advantage — player-initiated — is called.

Where the free kick is quite obvious, this system works, notwithstanding the merit or otherwise of the extent of the advantage provided.

However, when the free kick is indeterminate, whichever players have the ball or are contesting for the ball must turn their attention to one of three umpires to determine who will receive the free kick. If your team isn’t the recipient of the free kick, you’re in your back half and you kick the ball to an advantage situation without having seen the umpire’s signal, you gift the opposing team a 50-metre penalty and a gimme shot for goal.

So, player-initiated advantage is really only a benefit if it is a clear cut free kick and you’re in your forward half. Pardon us as small-‘l’ liberals, but we think that raises all sorts of inequities.

But we can go a step further and consider the whole notion of advantage in Aussie rules. As things stand at present, umpires blow their whistles for every decision that they make — even a mark in clear space where the player is odds-on to take the ball and immediately play-on is whistled as a mark.

Players have been conditioned through their entire careers to stop on the whistle. Rules have been introduced to reinforce that conditioned behaviour.

We aren’t expert in any other games — many would say not in Aussie rules either — but advantage seems to be dealt with more sensibly in other football codes. In rugby, for instance, it appears that the referee will hold off whistling to see how a particular piece of play unfolds. If the team receiving the penalty is advantaged by subsequent play, the referee indicates advantage has been awarded — without a whistle — and play continues. Both soccer and rugby league seem to follow a similar process.

We are also seeing player-initiated advantage being called by umpires on the most spurious evidence, such that, sometimes, there is an actual disadvantage, but this is an interpretation effect rather than a consequence of the advantage concept.

In the same way that video-assisted decision making doesn’t suit the flow of Aussie rules, advantage doesn’t suit the traditional umpiring style of Aussie rules.

We are certainly not in favour of so-called professional free kicks given away to slow opponents’ advances, but we are just as certain that the pendulum has been swung too far.

It’s not often that AussieRulesBlog sides with the AFL administration, but we think Adrian Anderson’s response to the suggestion of full-time field umpires got it about right.

Speaking on On the Couch on FoxSports, Richmond coach Damien Hardwick drew a comparison between the move to full-time footballers over the past decade and a half and the resolutely part-time AFL umpiring staff. The comparison suggests, and Hardwick spelt it out in plain English, that a move to full-time umpires would improve umpiring skills, as it has improved the skills of footballers — outside of goal kicking, of course!

It’s a superficially attractive proposition. Regular readers would be well aware that AussieRulesBlog doesn’t hold back when it comes to critiquing the performance of umpires or the AFL umpiring department. We should be jumping on the bandwagon enthusiastically — but we’re not.

With three field umpires on the ground, there’s rarely a time when umpires get caught out by the speed of the game, as used to happen in two-umpire and solo umpire eras. Two additional boundary umpires means that there are rarely times when there’s not at least one set of eyes reasonably well-positioned to9 judge out of bounds — a far different situation to solo boundary umps when the poor sods could sometimes be left trailing the ball by a hundred metres.

No, fitness and the speed of the game are no longer a factor in umpiring quality. The keys now are positioning and interpretation. The former was rarely a problem even for a flat-foot like Scott McLaren, and the latter is in the hands of the Rules Committee and Jeff Gieschen.

Hardwick was understandably looking for a way to eradicate the mistake that could be seen to have cost his side two points against the Saints, but the truth is that the blokes wearing the black guernsey with the yellow sash made many more errors that contributed far more materially to their team’s inability to win the game.

If footballers can be thought to have too much time on their hands, what would a full-time umpire do all day? The poor buggers would be bored to snores by Tuesday afternoon!

"There's a few things in the pipeline where we're looking at ways in which we can enhance performance." says Anderson. Dare we suggest Release the Giesch?? Go on, Adrian, kick the old duffer out on his ear and improve the game by 100% in a microsecond!

AussieRulesBlog is not shy of criticising others for making judgements on scant evidence — such as not having watched the bulk of a game —  and we dished out a pretty negative assessment on the Gold Coast Suns based on a quarter and a bit. We thought we should go back and watch the game.

What a pleasant surprise (although watching Carlton kick so many goals is pretty hard to stomach). Some key assessments based on the whole game, on television, are:

• Robert Walls and Ed Curnow's mother must have been very close once going by the way Walls pumps up Curnow.
• Karmichael Hunt didn't do a whole lot wrong.
• Daniel Harris is a gun.
• The umpires did the Suns no favours in the first quarter.
• For a team with twelve debutantes, the Suns did pretty well and showed enough to suggest they can be competitive by the end of 2011.
• Josh Fraser, Jarrod Harbrow and Jarrod Brennan need to spend a good while in the Hall of Mirrors.
• No amount of VFL football is an adequate preparation for senior AFL-standard football.

Overall, we're optimistic about the Suns. Charlie Dixon and Zac Smith, especially, look like they can have an impact in 2011.

There’s a significant problem in Australian Rules football and it centres on one of the most iconic contests in our game — the ruck.

With two generally large men contesting against each other to get a hand on the ball and feed it to their smaller teammates, the ruck is a vigorous part of the game.

The conundrum is the umpiring of these ruck contests. There can be a dozen contests with both players holding, pushing, shoving, leaning and generally making nuisances of themselves to keep their opponent off balance and away from the ball.

And then an umpire blows a free kick for some infinitesimal-looking incidental contact and we fans are left scratching our heads, wondering why this contest and not the previous dozen that looked just the same.

Ruck contests are the most unevenly umpired aspect of the game at AFL level, and often the most frustrating. If nothing else, it’s abundantly clear each week that ruckmen don’t understand why free kicks are being paid.

AussieRulesBlog isn’t a Robert Walls fan at the best of times, but his effort in the commentary box at the Suns’ first proper AFL game was atrocious by any measure.

We’re pretty sure he has never had an original thought and his ponderous monotone delivery is mind numbing, nevertheless we acknowledge that some people appreciate what they perceive as his forthrightness.

Let’s leave aside that someone had Channel 10 was having a lend of themselves scheduling Malcolm Blight — a Gold Coast Suns board member — and Walls — recently inducted as a Legend of Carlton Football Club (which says a lot about the Blues) — to do special comments on the Suns’ game against Carlton.

Other media people (mostly) manage to maintain a reasonable degree of objective decorum when doing one of their favourite team’s games. Everyone knows that Tim Lane, for instance, is a committed Blues man, but it rarely affects his call. Likewise Eddie Maguire and the Barcodes. Or Jason Dunstall and the Hawks.

Along with the position in the media comes a responsibility — not unlike that we foist onto players. We expect those in the media to comment without fear or favour. Walls failed the latter test utterly on Saturday night.

AussieRulesBlog suffered both Walls and the Suns until the Geelong-Fremantle game started. The Suns are clearly completely unprepared for elite football. Despite the big money splashed to gain a modicum of experience, it was pretty clear that the pre-season flattered the team. They were so far behind the Blues — mostly two to five metres! — that it’s really hard to see how they can compete with any other team this year — even Brisbane.

The AFL were clearly keen not to repeat what were seen as the mistakes in the birth of Brisbane. A group of, mostly, second-raters were gifted to Brisbane and went on to prove that it takes time to build a team. By gifting Gold Coast a plethora of draft picks, the AFL has, without doubt, provided hope for the Suns, but we’re not sure after Saturday night that perhaps a middle ground isn’t a better option. And the spectre of 2012 just got a hell of a lot more fearsome for a group of blokes out in western Sydney.