We have to wonder about the AFL. Not so long ago, they bent every effort to make the game faster and more continuous, most particularly with immediate kick-ins after behinds. Now, we’re told, the game is running too long.

Mark Stevens, in the Hun, even makes the extraordinary inference that fans might find a game of kick-to-kick fits into their schedules better — “… other sports are looking at shortened formats to keep fans interested, with cricket’s most popular form now Twenty20.” Seriously, is two and a half hours too long for the modern fan to concentrate?

“The real driver is the fans,” says Adrian Anderson. Well, Ando, old mate, what about undoing the immediate kick-in for  start? There’s a way to give players a rest during the game! Some of we fans could do with that rest too!

We’ve not finished groaning about the missed shot for goal when the ball is being rushed at breakneck speed through the opposition half-forward line, with our players haring back in desperate pursuit. We could do with a bit less of that.

But at a more basic level, Ando, it was the changes you blokes brought in that have created this hydra-headed monster. Rather than making more changes, have you considered winding a few of the recent changes back a bit?

And can we (not so) respectfully suggest to Ross Lyon that if he wants two 45-minute halves, he might be better suited to apply for Craig Bellamy’s job. Changing ends less frequently doesn’t bother the british bulldog blokes so much: if the ball’s in the air to be caught by a passing gale, it’s more likely been fumbled by someone than anything else.

You have to remember, Adrian, that footy is a little bit like climate change. You poke a bit more carbon dioxide into the air and it makes a subtle change that you don’t see for fifty years. In the meantime, you didn’t notice a change, so more carbon dioxide obviously wasn’t a problem. Then, by the time you realise carbon dioxide is a BIG problem, we’re all addicted to the stuff and we can’t turn the taps off. And the first lot of changes will now be affected even more by new sets of changes, and so on.

Every extra change we make to footy makes the game as a whole more like a chaotic weather system. No-one knows how the next lot of changes will turn out because the game is still digesting the changes for five to ten years ago.

We here at AussieRulesBlog have long held that umpires make some decisions based on guesswork. We had intuited this on the basis of a lifetime’s worth of football spectating.

Last Saturday evening, watching the last quarter of the North-Essendon game from an unaccustomed seven rows behind the fence, we saw Mark McVeigh fighting hard to gain possession of the ball and pulled to the ground with his back to the umpire. We know this because we were right on the umpire’s line of sight, so we were seeing pretty much exactly what the umpire was seeing.

We couldn’t see the ball. We didn’t know whether McVeigh still had the ball or whether a North opponent had taken it from him as they were surrounded by as many as fifteen players and buried under another four or five, with McVeigh still lying on the ground with his back to the umpire.

So the picture here is a confused tangle of bodies where we cannot be sure of the location — or possession — of the ball.

You know already, dear Reader, what happened next, don’t you? The umpire slowly brought the whistle to his mouth, blew a long blast and then made that awful sweeping gesture to indicate a free kick against McVeigh for not having disposed of the ball correctly.

So, the umpire either guessed, or is possessed of x-ray vision.

Either way, it’s not appropriate to make decisions on that basis.

Fresh from our mid-season R&R, AussieRulesBlog watched the Saints-Hawks game on television with renewed interest. The mixed blessing of access to the umpires’ audio feed provoked a number of questions.

Time to kick

Not for the first time, we noticed that a defender gets barely five seconds to compose himself and plan his kick before an officious voice (imagination required for Steve McBurney here) solemnly intones, “Move it along; play on!” and the umpire does a comical impression of an albatross taking off.

As the ball moves further toward the attacking goal, players seem to get more and more time.

Once there is a shot for goal involved, in contrast, the time allowed magically expands to twenty seconds before the player is called to start moving.

No doubt The Mikado (Jeff Gieschen, for those who haven’t followed the Gilbert and Sullivan association threads) will remind us that goals are important in the game and that players should have a reasonable chance to maximise the effectiveness of their kicks. Nor argument from us there, except that it’s reasonable to apply the same rule across the whole field.

‘Natural arc’ and moving off the line

An umpire in the aforementioned Saints-Hawks game penalised Leigh Montagna for taking a step toward Franklin who had run substantially off his line in taking a kick. The umpire did not call “play on!”, so we have no difficulty with the decision.

What did puzzle us though, was the explanation offered to Montagna by the umpire — that Franklin’s “natural arc” saved him from a play on call. Now, we wonder how much natural arc is allowed. If the Grand Final final siren has sounded and the Hawks are down five points with Franklin taking a kick from the right-hand behind post (that is, the behind post is on Franklin’s right side), how much natural arc will be allowed before “Play on!” is called and the match finishes before the kick is taken?

Once again, by way of contrast, some defenders seem to do little more than raise an eyebrow before being called to play on.

Five-metre zone

We also noticed that Hawthorn have modified the Collingwood tactic of blocking the man on the mark to facilitate a play on move. The Hawks’ method involves stationing someone fairly close to the mark who can quickly come in and block as soon as “Play on!” is called. Invariably, in our observation, the blocking player is within five metres of the player on the mark. When 50-metre penalties are being almost routinely awarded for players infringing the five-metre protected zone, it seems the umpires aren’t a wake-up to this variation on tactics.

After a week of mid-season R&R enjoying the sun in Merimbula — and missing the Akermanis sacking media blitz — AussieRulesBlog sat down to watch the St Kilda-Hawthorn game.

What a cracker of a game, with the draw being a fitting result that reduced the over-zealous umpiring effect to minimal.

Of greater interest were the armbands worn by each club. We’ve searched high and low this morning, but we can’t find any AFL statement changing their “black armband only” policy, laid down when Essendon first proposed the Call to Arms game to support cancer research and asked permission for both clubs to wear yellow armbands. Not possible said the AFL at the time; allow yellow and there’d be a flood of applications for armbands of many and varied hues.

The Saints and the Hawks playing for the Tynan-Eyre Cup each year is a fitting way to remind the community of the danger that our Police face on a daily basis, but the Police check armband isn’t black.

As best AussieRulesBlog can ascertain, Corey Bowen, the first-time AFL umpire at the centre of the controversy over five first-half 50-metre penalties resulting in goals to Melbourne in Round 15, did not get an AFL game in round 16.

This despite AFL umpiring boss Jeff Gieschen's assurances, on Monday night on One Week at a Time on OneHD, that all these decisions were correct.

It's not too big a stretch of the imagination to suspect that Bowen has been sent back to lower grades, but is it a punishment?

Were Gieschen's assurances worth the air expelled in uttering them, surely Bowen would have been assigned to another game, if nothing else, to dissuade those of us who might assume otherwise.

We also note that most of the decisions paid by Bowen in round 15 have not been copied by umpires in round 16. Funny that, but of course, according to Gieschen, there can be no question of the umpires deviating from the DVD interpretations distributed at the commencement of the season.

More utter nonsense from the AFL's king of spin! Gieschen must go!

We’re watching Jeff Gieschen on One Week at a Time on OneHD.

We don’t have a special focus from one week to another, says Gieschen. All we’re doing is umpiring to the DVD issued at the start of the season, says Gieschen.

Jeff, go down to the back corner of your garden, take a picture of the fairies and email it back to us!

Wanker!

Can it be that Ross Lyon is complaining that returning star Nick Riewoldt received too much physical attention from opponents?

What????

Is this the same Ross Lyon who coaches St Kilda, the team that serial pest and convicted star terroriser Steven Baker plays for?

We know that one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist, but this is bordering on the absurd.

It was only two weeks ago that Baker was assaulting Steve Johnson. Would Lyon have us believe that Baker took it upon himself to badger Johnson in that way? Does he seriously imagine that we could think those actions weren’t at least tacitly approved by himself?

Pull the other one, Ross, it plays Jingle Bells!

Five first-half 50-metre penalty goals to the Demons in their game against Essendon — all of them technically “there” perhaps, all of them severe and over-zealous interpretations on even the most charitable assessment and counter to the generally prevailing interpretations for the rest of the season and, without having the benefit of checking the replay yet, all of them the work of one umpire it seemed — accounted for the Demons lead at half time.

It matters not that the Demons looked the better team and deserved to win. If it were not already obvious, the application and severity of the 50-metre penalty must be reassessed.

As best AussieRulesBlog can determine, the umpire involved, Corey Bowen, was umpiring his first AFL game. Despite our deep frustration, we understand that nervousness on the big stage for the first time could lead to over-zealous officiating. Hopefully, he will learn from the experience, but the AFL must also learn the lesson that a blanket reliance on 50-metre penalties is damaging the game.

AussieRulesBlog is happy to concede that 50 metres is appropriate for deliberate and clearly-obvious time-wasting or for deliberate violence.

Interchange infringements seem to us to be pretty minor in the spectrum of offences. If a team has an extra player on the field due to sloppy interchanging and either that player is involved in the play or is on the field for more than, say, five seconds, we’re happy with a 50-metre penalty. If those conditions are not met, forget it.

Offences at the mark should be dependant on whether the umpire has set the mark. If a player runs over the mark immediately subsequent to a legitimate attempt to spoil, carried there by his momentum, providing he immediately attempts to take up a more realistic mark and moves backward to assume a more realistic position, no penalty should be applied. An umpire could adjust that positioning without penalty, provided reasonable instructions were obeyed.

We are all for penalising players who intentionally drag down a player who has marked, if the tackling player was not in the marking contest. This does constitute time wasting and the 50-metre penalty is appropriate.

If, however, the players are involved in a contest for the mark, that is, they are touching or almost touching each other, regardless of whether the defending player actually makes contact with the ball, the tackling/defending player is not wasting time, but competing for the ball. Applying a 50-metre penalty in these circumstances reduces Aussie rules to a game of netball.

As custodians of the game, it is incumbent on the AFL to introduce a lesser penalty — perhaps 25 metres — for some lesser-severity offences. The lesser penalty may also reduce the impact of incorrect decisions.

We would also hope that umpires beginning their senior AFL careers might be past nervousness.

It’s hard to figure out what medium-term benefits Port Adelaide gain from sacking their senior coach after fifteen rounds.

Short term, the players are likely to play out of their skins against an in-form Collingwood tonight. Mick Malthouse cannot be pleased to hear of his fellow coach’s demise.

Longer term, Port have plenty of time to identify available coaching talent and scoop the cream before others have a chance.

In the medium term, whoever takes over as caretaker has little option but to continue with the Williams gameplan. It’s too late in the season to contemplate significant restructure.

From half a country away, it seems to have been a media-driven frenzy of speculation for the last eighteen months over Williams’ future, relations with CEO and Board, relations with players, relations with assistant coaches, and relations with whoever could be used to create the impression of discord.

It may be that there is and was genuine discord between Williams and one or many of the aforementioned groups, but there’s little doubt that the media in general have blood on their hands tonight.

Rob Gill, of Swinburne Uni, has posted a link to a survey he’s running of perceptions of umpires. here’s the post:

Greetings footy fans
I am researching the AFL umpires and our perceptions of their performance.
Would very much appreciate you taking a few minutes to complete this voluntary survey (link below). Rest assured your answers will remain completely anonymous.
http://opinio.online.swin.edu.au/s?s=AFL_Umpires_2010
Please feel free to pass it on to any friends and associates who might like to have their say!
Thanks
Rob Gill
Swinburne University of Technology

AussieRulesBlog has already responded to the survey. We indicated, as best we were able given the questions asked, that ‘problems’ with umpiring, at least at the AFL level, are more to do with direction from the AFL umpiring department and much less to do with individual umpires’ performance. We even included our daily prayer: Release The Giesch!!!! Feel free to pass my response on to The Giesch, Rob!

Anyway, if you’re reading this, be a good little Vegemite and give Rob some data for his research.

There has been much made of the performance of young Irishman Michael Quinn in the Bombers’ 84-point drubbing at the hands of the Crows. Quinn had eight possessions, but, with clangers and frees against, finished the night on zero Supercoach points.

AussieRulesBlog admires the young bloke’s gumption to up sticks and travel halfway round the world to have a crack at a foreign football code.

Quinn is one of the results of either:

1. a myth that the Draft is the only source of potentially capable players; or
2. a belief that the next Jim Stynes is lurking somewhere in a young Irish body.

We don’t have any stats to back it up, but our impression is that the ranks of Irish VFL/AFL stars are pretty thin. The aforementioned Stynes, Tadgh Kennelly, Marty Clarke and Sean Wight would be about it. Setanta O’hAilpin tries hard but still looks like a fish out of water. Stynes’ brother, Brian, managed a few games, but didn’t have his brother’s touch in the foreign code and another O’hAilpin had a try, without success.

It’s hardly a Hall of Fame roll call, yet clubs and recruiters have kept going back to kiss the Blarney Stone and light the fire of hope in young Irish hearts.

The lot of local kids who enter the Draft, but aren’t picked, has been pretty dim. At 17 or 18, a bunch of recruiters pass a judgement on your worth and your papers are stamped. For many, that stamp is NOT UP TO AFL STANDARD.

Thankfully, once almost by accident and once with a pleasing degree of persistence from the player and prescience from the recruiter, in 2010 we’ve seen an inkling that so-called mature-age recruits — Michael Barlow is an ancient 22 years! — still have something to offer.

The Podsiadly story is by now so well known that we need not repeat any of it. Suffice to say that Geelong’s lucky rabbit’s foot was involved in them recruiting the 28-year-old as an ancillary whilst he played for the Cats’ VFL team. The 2010 story is of an emerging key forward averaging something approaching four goals per game — admittedly with the competition’s premier midfield delivering the ball to advantage more times than not.

Poor ‘old’ Michael Barlow must have thought himself destined for the dimmer lights and lighter pay packets of the VFL, SANFL and WAFL, if he was lucky. Fremantle’s gamble has paid off handsomely with Barlow getting plenty of attention in Brownlow Medal betting markets. His broken leg is a setback, but we should all hope he recovers like Michael Voss rather than like Nathan Brown.

It’s so obvious that it hardly needs pointing out, but, unlike Quinn and O’hAilpin, Podsiadly and Barlow already knew how to play Aussie rules. How much coaching time spent on Quinn and O’hAilpin could have been better spent honing the skills of a Barlow or a Podsiadly.

More recently, the high-profile signings of Karmichael Hunt and Israel “The Promised Land” Folau risk the same outcomes as Quinn and O’hAilpin. Of course, in the push into hostile NRL territory, Hunt and Folau offer a publicity edge that is attractive, but their playing worth is yet to be tested. One wonders what Hunt is thinking after his first couple of outings for Gold Coast.

We hope that AFL clubs and recruiters learn the lesson: there are plenty of local kids who were too small, too slow or too immature. They can now make a substantial and relatively quick transition to effective players, rather than the four or six-year lead times for an international hopeful.

No-one should be surprised at the latest boot-in-mouth effort from peroxided human headline Jason Akermanis.

Controversy and belittling others is the stock in trade of commercial talk radio and, despite the model having previously flopped in Melbourne, Melbourne Talk Radio’s Steve Price is unashamedly following the Sydney 2GB template.

Akermanis has both the profile and the mouth to be a perfect fit for MTR. He’s opinionated, outrageous, a Brownlow medallist and triple-Premiership player in the AFL city and has always courted the edgy side of publicity.

With barely two months remaining of his illustrious, but ill-starred, sporting career, Akermanis has clearly set himself to maximising his assets to build a career in media.

The problem is that the only people listening to Aker on MTR are other media, waiting for him to open his mouth and insert his boot.

Another problem is that we at AussieRulesblog are, like many others we suspect, simply tired of this tiresome little man.

We knew there was another issue from the weekend that had annoyed us, but it wasn’t until tonight’s news that we recalled it.

News that the Match Review Panel had decided that Brian Lake’s ‘punch’ to Lance Franklin did not have sufficient force to warrant consideration throws up a consequent question: why then was Franklin not cited for staging?

It’s hard to think of a clearer example of staging than this. It closely mirrors the Kane Cornes example in the video released as part of the AFL’s explanation of the staging sanctions, in that Franklin’s actions are out of all proportion to the force of impact and are clearly designed to fool the umpire into awarding a free kick.

By the by, Franklin’s attention to the umpires is not an isolated incident. We acknowledge that his reputation as a dangerous forward means that he receives close, and often illegal, attention from defenders, but he gives the impression of looking for assistance from the umpire at every opportunity, rather than just getting on with playing the game.

It may not be according to the ideal, but were we an umpire and given a choice between awarding a free kick to an out and out ball player or to a whinger, the whinger wouldn’t be first in the queue. But back to the MRP.

It’s not hard to make a case for the MRP not having a firm grasp of the rules they are charged with administering. It’s also not hard to make a case for some players being more closely reviewed than others. The table of force, location and intent is a reasonable and logical basis for the league’s enforcers to start with. It’s the inconsistency of application that is worrying.

As we watched a dribbled attempt to score a goal run pathetically across the vacant goal face, it occurred to AussieRulesBlog that this modern penchant for dribbled goals is nothing more than players showing off.

We acknowledge that we are not alone, and certainly not the first, to rail against the recent preference of skilful players for rolling the ball through for a goal rather than kicking it through the air.

There are times when it is a logical and effective tactic: shots on the run from the region of the point post benefit from the sort of bend that can be obtained bouncing the ball.

There are also too many instances when a dribbled shot is dramatically inappropriate — the most famous being Steve Milne’s shot in the 2009 Grand final.

The fact is that our oval-shaped Aussie rules ball has inbuilt uncertainty when rolling or bouncing. Almost all of that uncertainty is removed when the ball flies through he air.

AFL players are professional athletes. They are paid substantial sums of money and their primary objective is to win games of football. The primary method of winning games of football is to score more goals than the opposition.

Why then, as a highly-paid professional athlete, would you purposely increase the uncertainties in attempting to score a goal?

The answer, it seems to us, is nothing more than self-indulgence. These actions are often defended by asserting that players actually practice rolling the ball through from various angles. Great! If there’s no other alternative, the chances of scoring a goal from a compromised opportunity can be increased. In all other circumstances, professional players, whose professional reputations depend to some extent on how many goals they kick and their scoring efficiency, should take the least uncertain method to attempt to score.

Anything less marks them as show ponies.

As we watched the painful demolition of the Bombers by the Crows last night, we couldn’t believe our eyes as a goal was overturned.

Let’s be clear from the start that this decision had absolutely zero impact on the result. It’s remarkable enough that the Upper Kumbukta West F-grade Reserves had been delegated the task of impersonating an AFL team.

No, The Giesch’s boys managed an even more remarkable event. A boundary umpire, who must have been at least fourteen metres away and on just about the worst possible angle for making such a call, managed to overrule a goal umpire who was within a metre of the ball, insisting, despite the goalie’s protestations, that the ball had glanced the post. The TV replay demonstrated amply that the boundary umpire was delusional.

We’re all for co-operative umpiring, although it was sadly missing in last week’s St Kilda-Geelong game when Steven Baker was harassing Steve Johnson. We’re all for co-operative umpiring when the guy charged with making a decision is unsure or was unsighted.

How or why the boundary ump got involved is a matter for conjecture since the TV director was busy giving us the ‘nose hair’ close-up of the putative goal scorer at the time.

All of this was happening as the whistle-blowers continued their newfound fascination with 50-metre penalties. This umpiring department has utterly and completely lost its way. The Giesch and his crew are now as adept at swinging to meet the breeze of public opinion as the most reactive of politicians. There’s only one rejoinder to this mess: Release the Giesch!!!

The umpires in tonight’s Hawthorn-Bulldogs game have obviously been instructed to pay a free kick for pretty much any physical contact off the ball — yet another hysterical overreaction by the Giesch and his charges.

We’ve just witnessed Steve McBurney — who else? — paying a free kick against the run of play when Franklin layed a glancing block on a Bulldogs defender to free up a Hawks teammate. Since when did this become illegal? We’ve been watching AFL/VFL for more than forty years and this is a first.

About the only consistency the AFL umpiring department can provide is the assurance of maniacal obsession with “the rule of the week”.

And that’s not even to consider the 50-metre penalties for the newly-newsworthy “prohibited contact”.

Seriously, AFL umpires aren’t at the abysmal level set by FIFA’s World Cup referees — and Australia wants to host that joke of a tournament? — but a controversy is certain to get the whistleblowers blowing frantically at every available opportunity.

Release the Giesch!!