This game just keeps throwing up scenarios, doesn’t it? This week, we’ll all be talking and writing about Barry Hall, and so we should. But let’s also add the names of Tayte Pears, Nick Riewoldt and Matthew Lloyd (with apologies to others not listed).

What do all these players have in common? Simple, they’ve all been unfairly monstered by opponents in pursuit of advantage.

Hall, as everyone on the planet must now know, was kneed while tying a boot lace.

Pears, returning a broken hand/arm, was punched on said limb by Jack Riewoldt.

Nick Riewoldt, having injured a shoulder during a game against Brisbane, was crashed into by Mal Michael.

Matthew Lloyd, like Pears returning from a hand injury, had Steven Kretiuk attempting to punch said hand.

AussieRulesBlog acknowledges that we spiritually inhabit a bygone (some would say fictional) era of chivalric sportsmanship. We have previously railed against the modern practice of banging and crashing opponents before the opening bounce.

The spirit of the game we love is embodied in David Hille turning back to check on the seriously injured Jamie Charman after seconds before competing very strongly against him. It is a matter of great regret to us that Hille has, three times in this season, handed out late hits on opponents. These incidents have done him no credit whatsoever.

We don’t have an issue with aggression on the football field, but where it is not directed essentially at the ball, the spirit of our game suffers, and the essence of a fair go, enshrined in the laws of the game, is diminished.

It is an oft-spoken tenet of our game that everyone who runs out for the game is 100% fit. We at AussieRulesBlog agree wholeheartedly with this tenet as long as the contest is only for the ball. Premeditated attacks on players designed to take advantage of some weakness are to be deplored and the players engaging in such attacks are the vilest of creatures.

Winning at all costs is a false idol.

Regular readers will know that we at AussieRulesBlog are long-time Bombers fans, so it’s important to state at the outset that this post is not (intended to be) a case of grandstanding after a victory.

We wonder whether, after a stellar 2009, the Saints can again scale those same heights.

We look back at the experience of Essendon’s Matthew Lloyd, who was never the same dominant player after tearing his hammy from the bone.

Nick Riewoldt’s injury would appear to be less severe than that extreme (Lloyd’s), but nevertheless is likely to restrict his famously high in-game workrate to at least some extent.

What makes Riewoldt’s absence more troubling for a Saints Premiership tilt is the failure, so far, of his teammates to step up to the breach.

We are firmly of the opinion that the secondary effect of Riewoldt’s absence — after the loss of his possessions and presence — has been the Saints’ remaining big forwards suddenly finding themselves matched against a better class of defender. It’s fair to assume that the opposition’s best tall defender would normally go to Riewoldt, but is now pitted against Koschitzke (or Fisher or Goddard).

When the Saints’ game style was already under attack as opposition coaches developed strategies to combat it, the loss of Riewoldt’s lead-up presence and strong contested marking has left the Saints somewhat leaderless up forward.

The writing had been faintly visible on the wall later in the 2009 season when the Saints lost two games, but has blazed into full view as Riewoldt’s absence in 2010 suggests they will struggle to maintain the same game style and intensity.

The big question will be how well Riewoldt heals and how close to his former output he can achieve. His expected return later in the 2010 season can hardly be expected to produce much more than increased morale, as he’ll be severely underdone for match practice at least.

As each year passes, and Riewoldt’s body ages, his output and impact on matches would be naturally diminishing anyway. Factor in this serious hamstring injury and the fall away will be more pronounced.

Can the current Saints win a Premiership without Riewoldt? Three losses in four weeks would suggest they can’t. Can they win with Riewoldt-lite? It would seem to be unlikely at best. It’s unfortunate that this most effective example of the benefits of the AFL’s equalisation strategy should have run up against what may yet turn out to be as good a team as the competition has seen in its history.

Sunday’s free kick against Essendon’s Cale Hooker for a deliberately rushed behind, subsequently adjudicated as the correct decision by Giesch and Co, brings into sharp focus the extremely hazy definition of “pressure” in the context of this rule.

Hooker was a little further out from the goal line than Henry Slattery a few weeks earlier, but had lost his footing where Slattery maintained his. Koschitzke was three or four metres from Hooker and could reasonably have been expected to be moving quickly to tackle Hooker (that he wasn’t says more about Kosi than about the rule!). Slattery had Franklin a couple of metres behind him.

In neither case did the Essendon player get tackled across the goal line.

So, The Giesch says the Slattery decision was wrong, and Scott McLaren paid a price for it, and now says the Hooker decision was right.

AussieRulesBlog would be happy for both to be right, and many more besides, but once again ‘interpretations’ have left the game in a very murky place.

The issue for The Giesch now is to come up with an everyman explanation of “pressure” in the context of this rule — an everyman explanation that umpires can apply, correctly and consistently, in a split second; an everyman explanation that tells players precisely what they can and can’t do. Oh, and it would be useful if fans were let in on the secret too!

Hawthorn coach Alastair Clarkson’s outburst over the colour worn by the umpires for the Hawthorn-Richmond game this weekend seems to have been a desperate tactic from a club performing way below even their harshest critics’ expectations.

In a video interview screened through the AFL’s website Adrian Anderson says, “[Hawthorn] made a specific request to be able to wear their home guernsey, their normal guernsey, and white shorts on the weekend, knowing that the umpires had been allocated green.” Originally the AFL had designated Hawthorn to wear their primarily white clash strip for the game.

The colour worn by the umpires this weekend was that worn by “learning umpires” (seen at AFL games each week being worn by the umpires of the half-time Auskick games), according to Anderson. We note, with ill-concealed glee, that the learning colour is particularly appropriate to a number of senior umpires who appear to be umpiring to a different rule book to the rest of us.

Watching the game online, the green colour of the umpires’ shirts is much deeper than it appeared live, but, along with wearing navy blue shorts rather than the white worn by Hawthorn, there is quite clearly no clash between the umpires and Hawthorn.

Watching live, the clash is even less in evidence. The revelation that Hawthorn knowingly instigated the “clash” is suspicious, at the very least.

So what was Clarkson’s outburst all about? Perhaps he’s learned some lessons from his President? Such as, if there’s a question you don’t want asked, take an early opportunity to build a straw man — colour clash in this case — and then proceed to punch it around the head until it’s the story, thereby deflecting attention from the real story.

Along with Jeff Kennett’s silly outburst over the Ben Cousins interview on On the Couch, the Clarkson outburst suggests a club desperate to avoid being put under the microscope.

Shock! Hold the front page! Jeff Kennett has got it wrong. “WTF?,” we imagine you all thinking. Imagine Jeff getting it wrong? Who would have thought it? Indeed.

Whilst AussieRulesBlog would agree that the interview on On the Couch accorded overdue weight to Cousins’ well-publicised addiction, Kennett’s apparently semi-informed, dial-a-quote, day-late response was, predictably, ill-considered and over the top.

“''No doubt Ben agreed to be there but the three interviewers just continually went on about his past… ,” Kennett is quoted as saying.

The fact is, Jeff, Cousins was only doing the interview because of his past — Brownlow medallist, club captain, Premiership player, self-confessed drug addict. Which bit of that combination doesn’t scream human interest and compelling television to you, Jeff?

More to the point, Jeff, whilst we second your call for the media to stop hounding Cousins, the man obviously saw the interview as an opportunity to lay out his side of the story in a public forum, without the intervening lens of increasingly tabloid-style repackaging that would inevitably accompany an interview for a print story.

Cousins displayed, in our view, a degree of honesty and openness about the drug issues in his life and the importance of football and Richmond’s faith in him in his rehabilitation that could only be inspiring. Leadership pours out of every pore on his body. Paradoxically, the kids at Richmond may be the most fortunate young players in the AFL if they can absorb the positives that radiated from Cousins’ every answer.

One other thing, Jeff. We’ve seen many more appalling interviews — those you gave during your political career, for a start. Had you been as honest as Cousins, you might still be Premier!

By the way, Scott Spits (who wrote the Age piece), had you bothered to watch On the Couch, or a tape of it, or one of the many You-tube uploads, you would have known that James Hird was in absentia, replaced for the night by Brian Taylor. Which leads us to wonder whether you are quoting Kennett or merely paraphrasing a third- or fourth-hand account.

Speculation of AFL clubs enticing top NRL players is rife at the moment. Anyone on an NRL roster, it seems, is fair game for speculation. Israel Folau, Billy Slater, Greg Inglis — it just goes on and on, with Karmichael Hunt already on the books for GC17.

Let’s look at the problems these athletes would encounter transferring to AFL:

• Kicking
  Rugby League players don’t have a need to kick with precision in the same way as AFL players in the modern era. And not everyone on an NRL roster has licence to kick. Kicking is perhaps the most difficult, and most fundamentally-required of the Aussie rules skills.
• Stamina
  Rugby League players require acceleration and hitting power, even the runners like Slater. It’s rare for them to run more than perhaps twenty metres in one effort. Modern AFL requires the stamina of a marathoner and the speed of a sprinter.
• 360º pressure
  Rugby league pits one team in a line across the field against the other team in a line across the ground. Pressure and tackling is anticipated front on, or perhaps to the side. Aussie rules is a full 360º sport, 100% of the time. 360º awareness will take considerable time to acquire.
• Body shape
  NRL players carry a great deal more ‘condition’ than their AFL counterparts because momentum is such a crucial part of NRL. Mass × velocity = momentum. A heavier player hits the defensive live with more momentum, tiring out opponents and potentially opening up opportunities for breakouts.
  
  As Bombers fans, AussieRulesBlog recalls a season when the great James Hird overdosed on the weights during preseason and began the season looking like someone had surgically implanted a professional wrestler’s shoulders and chest onto his relatively slight frame. Hird wasn’t worth a drink of water for many weeks until he’d sloughed off that extra ‘condition’. It’s not unreasonable to imagine that NRL types losing their ‘condition’ will be different athletes than their former selves.
  
  In recent times, only Mal Michael comes to mind as a genuinely big, heavily muscled player who succeeded at the elite level (and it’s questionable whether he could be as effective in the game as it’s being played in 2010).
  

There’s no doubt that Hunt has been a valuable PR tool, but we’re yet to see any athletic contribution other than a very nice advertisement that may or may not have been shot somewhere in the vicinity of Paris and may or may not have required two days worth of takes to get the ball handling looking vaguely right.

From our uninformed position down here in “Mexico”, we get the distinct impression that NRL players often have difficulty in transferring to rugby union and having a major impact and those two codes clearly have much more in common that do NRL and Aussie rules.

Will Hunt, Slater, Inglis, Folau or someone of similar ilk be the next big thing in AFL? NRL = Not Really Likely.

AussieRulesBlog has been unconvinced of the need for clash strips until last night’s Melbourne–Western Bulldogs game. One of two clear cases of mistaken identity may have cost the young Melbourne side a famous victory over an early-season Premiership favourite.

The AFL’s support of the Breast Cancer Network is most laudable. The field of women is a graphic depiction of the numbers of people touched in some way by breast cancer and its awareness-raising potential is huge.

Likewise, with President Jim Stynes engaged in his own fight against cancer, Melbourne’s decision to replace the red yoke on their playing strip with pink was pretty much a no-brainer and a further valuable exposition of the cause.

The problems arise when some numbskull at AFL headquarters, where someone must have approved the Melbourne strip beforehand, decided that the umpires could also support the cause through being decked out in pink shirts with navy blue shorts.

Pink yoke with royal blue body and shorts with pink socks. Pink shirt with navy blue shorts and pink socks. Nah, it’ll never be an issue. Royal blue and navy blue are SO different. NOT!

At least twice during a tense and closely fought game, Melbourne players gave the ball off instinctively to a peripherally-sensed teammate — who turned out to be an umpire decked out in a facsimile of the Melbourne uniform.

These are not trivial matters and someone at AFL House must be on the lookout for similar possibilities. For goodness sakes, they insist on North wearing an Argentine shirt when playing Collingwood. So, was someone asleep at the wheel in this case?

And let’s leave aside for now the spectre of boundary umpires guessing or assuming that the ball crossed the boundary line on the full from a player’s boot or lower leg. Let’s also leave aside for the moment the pathetic, pestering, posturing pedant that is Steve McBurney.

Finally, respect and kudos for Melbourne in taking it right up to a better-credentialed opponent.

Sitting in the great Southern Stand last night watching the BombersHawks clash, AussieRulesBlog was astounded at the variance of the umpiring from all but one other game we have seen, either live or on TV, in the first five rounds.

We have no argument with the free kick awarded against Slattery for a rushed behind, but it’s not the way the rule has been umpired since it was introduced.

We have no argument against a player tackling a player who has just marked being penalised, but Jordan Lewis was entitled to be gobsmacked because the ball had clearly and obviously — to everyone except the controlling umpire — not travelled 15 metres.

There were other instances that we cannot recall in detail at this moment — the Foxtel replay having been bumped in the schedule by some obscure hit and giggle cricket tournament.

We are struggling to avoid concluding that the presence of ‘Razor’ Ray Chamberlain and Scott McLaren on the umpiring ‘team’ presaged something out of the ordinary. We are uncommonly grateful that Steve McBurney was otherwise engaged. THAT particular AFL version of the Bermuda Triangle could see the rules of the game as we know them disappear forever!

Regular readers will know that we have consistently demanded nothing less of the umpiring fraternity than consistency. We accept that umpires on the ground will have a different view, and therefore a different application of the rules. What we cannot accept, and it has been a feature of the Gieschen reign at umpiring HQ, is changing interpretations of rules and changing applications from week to week.

For the most part in season 2010, umpiring has been at what most would regard as the ‘sensible’ end of the continuum. Enter the Chamberlain/McLaren team and their hair trigger application of rules which is a long way toward the loony zealot end of the scale.

Must we say it again? Oh, alright! Release the Giesch! (and send Chamberlain, McLaren and McBurney off to football purgatory with him.)