Rules still misunderstood

Every week at the game — and it happened to us again last night — we are surprised to find ourselves waiting breathlessly for an umpire to award a free kick penalty for a rushed behind as an opposition player takes the ball across the goal line in general play. Of course, we can wait breathlessly until the cows come home — it’s not going to happen.

 

Along with the AFL’s sanctions against staging, the rushed behind rule may be the most widely misunderstood rule in the history of sport!

 

The rushed behind rule (click the link in the tag cloud for more on this) should be renamed the Joel Bowden Timewasting Rule. That scenario, of stepping back over the goal line at a kick-in after a behind (the Bowden Manoeuvre), is the only scenario where a free kick will be awarded.

 

Likewise, people are desperately waiting for an umpire to report a player — Riewoldt has been the target of choice — for accentuating contact in a contested ball scenario, especially marking, under the AFL’s staging sanctions.

 

It was clear from the video distributed by the AFL at the time that the sanctions did not apply to players accentuating illegal contact in contested situations. Perhaps Riewoldt’s enforced lay-off will allow the more zealous of these critics to take a breath and recompose themselves.

 

These two examples are but the most recent. Even the most common of umpiring decisions are misunderstood by most of the crowd going by the regular (and obviously ill-informed) roars from crowds. Ask a hundred people near you at a game and you’ll get a hundred different versions of “holding the ball”, “holding the man”, “prior opportunity”, and so on — not to mention the large number of superhumans within the crowd who can spot the tiniest infringement a hundred and more metres away on the other side of the ground completely unaided by any sight improvement technology.

 

We can’t figure out why, but the AFL clearly hasn’t communicated these rules or interpretations effectively to the vast majority of the football-watching population.

 

There is some ‘education’ via the umpires’ mikes during games on television, but this is hardly a seriously designed communication campaign to improve fans’ understanding of the rules.

 

If the administrators of the game are really serious about improving general attitudes toward umpires, the best thing they could do would be to institute a planned and comprehensive communication campaign to educate the football world — it might take longer with Carlton supporters as their natural assumption of privileged treatment would need to be overcome first.