No tolerance for inflexibility

Having spent much of the pre-season competition period in northern climes, AussieRulesBlog has been catching up with some of the games from that period.

 

The two biggest things that struck us, apart from the non-apocalyptic effect of interchange caps, were the new interpretation of the push in the back rule and the new rule against forceful contact below the knees.

 

No doubt, like everyone else, The Giesch’s team will take a little while to come to grips with how these work. The pre-season final seemed to be far more sensibly umpired in these respects than some of the other pre-season games.

 

We’re most uncomfortable with interpretations that don’t allow the officiating umpire to take into account the context of what they see before them.

 

So a player who was bending over to take possession of the ball and bumped into an opponents lower legs was free-kicked in a game we viewed tonight. Bending over, not sliding in. Is it the rule that’s poorly written, the interpretation that’s poorly written, or the umpire getting it wrong?

 

And in the push in the back instance, we’ve seen numerous examples of tackled players being rolled in the tackle to avoid the tackler making contact to the back, but the umpire awarding a free kick, presumably because they thought there must have been miniscule contact to the back.

 

Neither of these rules are going to be popular with fans as the interpretations stand. Stadiums are going to erupt when these free kicks are awarded. We think players will also feel hard done by as they make strenuous efforts to avoid illegal contact.

 

Setting up rigid criteria for these rules follows the patterns set in previous years by The Giesch. As the season begins, umpires are calling every little incident that might be perceived to infringe these new interpretations. It results in over-fussy umpiring, frustrated players and a fanbase even more disenchanted with the whistleblowers.

 

It’s hard to understand how this is a positive for a part of the game struggling to attract recruits.

 

We estimate about round 4 as the time we’ll start noticing that zero-tolerance rules are being umpires with a little flexibility.

 

If the AFL, or the AFL Umpiring Department were under the benign dictatorship of AussieRulesBlog, our first instruction would be to give umpires the prerogative to apply the rules in the context of the game going on in front of them. We’d also conduct a vigourous and lengthy campaign to educate football followers to understand how umpires would interpret the rules.

 

Just waiting for Mike Fitzpatrick’s call . . .