Game of the year in round one?

It would be pretty easy to mount a case that we saw the best game for the season in round one on Easter Monday. The Hawks and Cats duked it out before a great crowd, with the Cats maintaining their dominance of the Hawks and getting the cream.

 

As good as Ablett was on Saturday night, how good was Joel Selwood today? What a player, what a captain!! And Sam Mitchell might not be the spiritual leader of the Hawks, but he is without peer as a pinpoint midfield disposal machine. Some of his foot passes had to be seen to be believed.

 

For all the great things about the game though, and there were many, there were some key negatives.

 

How does a player who loses his footing millimetres in front of a pursuing opponent get a free kick when his opponent stumbles over him? The new interpretation of a push in the back is fine if it is a guy laying on an opponent. This wasn’t. This was a rubbish decision, there’s just no other way to call it.

 

How does a player, already on the ground, roll over and brush an opponent’s shin and get free kicked for a forceful sliding tackle? Another rubbish decision.

 

Why is a ball dribble-kicked along the boundary for 40 metres penalised for deliberate out of bounds — nonsense decision, especially when the player had no other options available — while another kick down the line, but ten metres from the boundary, which takes a fickle bounce and goes out of bounds is not paid as deliberate out of bounds? Does the umpiring department know that AFL is played with an elliptical ball which has an unpredictable bounce?

 

Finally, it’s depressing that so many free kicks are for tiggy touchwood contact, but so many more purposeful illegal contacts which seem blindingly obvious are missed.

 

We expect that the umpiring interpretations will soften in a few weeks, but why do we have to go through this nonsense at the start of every season? Surely someone at Giesch Central can decide on an interpretation which takes into account real world circumstances? Why is it they begin the season umpiring to the letter of the law — and beyond — only to soften that attitude weeks later when there’s been a hue and cry about umpiring? It can’t be that difficult to come up with a middle-of-the-road starting point and follow it for the year!

 

And, for those who haven’t heard, Jeff Kennett apparently has called for Alistair Clarkson to be sacked at the end of the year after a more than honourable 8-point loss to one of the best teams in the country in round one of the season. If anyone harboured any delusions that Kennett is not a prize idiot, surely this will remove them.