AFL football operations boss Adrian Anderson has announced only minor changes to the open sore that was player-initiated advantage.

Anderson said the slight modification was made after feedback from clubs, players and fans. Well, that may be strictly true, but AussieRulesBlog finds it difficult to imagine that any of the mentioned groups would have agreed to the rule remaining in any form.

Advantage will not apply in 2012 to free kicks paid by an “out-of-zone” umpire. Superficially, this seems like an improvement, but there are plenty of scenarios in games, especially at stoppages at either end of the ground, where two umpires operate in quite close proximity.

The umpires seem to have a fairly good handle on which of them is in control at any point, but for the rest of us it is a mystery.

Most puzzlingly, in 2012 the umpires will have “more time allowed … to consider the actual advantage.”

What? If there’s no advantage, they’ll call the ball back? Certainly, there were any number of incidents during 2011 where this seemed to happen, despite the provision for such action having been removed in the rewriting of the advantage law to allow player-initiated advantage.

The game now finds itself in a position where the lawmakers don’t rewrite a law that doesn’t work. Instead, changes to interpretations — for the most part not codified — are announced, and then the interpretation of the interpretation changes evolve over time as the laws committee and the umpiring administration realise that their initial interpretations are overzealous.

This continual tinkering, especially when it’s not spelled out clearly in a written law, is a crock.

Player-initiated advantage was, and is, a nonsense in Australian rules. It doesn’t work. Players are confused. Umpires are confused. Media are confused. Fans are confused. These changes don’t turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse. It’s still a sow’s ear, no matter how hard the AFL talks it up.

If 2011 has been notable for anything, it has been the slow-motion car crash that is the revised Advantage law. Continuing our Focus on Rules series, AussieRulesBlog looks at the Advantage rule.

Once again, we’ve found new respect for the on-field officials after reading these laws carefully. We hope you’ll gain a new appreciation for the difficulties of their task and the complexities of the laws they are exercising during games.

Here is the Law as it has appeared over the past four years. The (colour) key is:

Black: from 2008 (earliest electronic Laws of Football we could locate).

Red: Inserted 2009.

Blue: Added 2011.

Strikethrough: removed 2011.

The crucial changes, fairly obviously, are those made to Law 17.3. It’s worth noting that the change has removed the umpire’s discretion to call the ball back if advantage doesn’t eventuate — a provision that was available until the 2011 change.

AussieRulesBlog has noted on a number of occasions that “advantage” is quite unsuited to Australian Rules football. Our umpires are schooled, right from the beginning, to blow the whistle when they see an infringement. Players are schooled, right from the beginning, to stop on hearing the whistle. So fundamental has the notion to stop on the whistle been that umpires have been instructed, prior to 2011, to award fifty-metre penalties — based on the “time wasting” provision — against players continuing on with their actions after the whistle.

Into this long-standing tenet of the game, the AFL introduces player-initiated advantage. Players may now play on — as it were — after the whistle, provided they are sure their team is receiving the free kick. In a paradox, if the player continuing on with play gets it wrong, the fifty-metre “time wasting” penalty is still available to the umpire. For the most part, umpires have dealt with this paradox with admirable commonsense.

It’s also worth noting that explanations from The Giesch about controversial advantage decisions have prominently featured the notion that play must be continuous for player-initiated advantage to apply. It’s abundantly clear, reading the new Law 17.3 above, that this is not codified in the Law and is simply a matter of interpretation. The Giesch has been snowing us — again! Any number of advantage situations, especially inside forward 50s, have featured clearly stopped play with one opportunist taking a punt — clearly, to our mind, outside of the spirit of the game even if in sync with the Law as written.

We must note that in other football codes, referees hold the whistle in an advantage situation to see if the advantage plays out. If it doesn’t, the whistle is blown and play returns to the site of the penalty/foul.

The new law 17.3 is a dog and no-one will be surprised if it is euthanased at the conclusion of the season. AussieRulesBlog would go further and remove advantage from our game completely. The vagaries are too large and the penalties too harsh against the other team. Please Adrian and Rules Committee, put this abomination of a law out of our misery!

AussieRulesBlog hopes the “clarification” of the advantage rule provided to AFL clubs is more effective that the version posted to the AFL website.

We don’t feel any wiser than we did before seeing this “clarification”. And beyond providing a justification for Barcodes supporters to claim, “We woz robbed!”, we’re not quite sure what has been clarified.

Still, the player-initiated advantage rule does have an element of pure luck about it which is perfectly in keeping with the game’s addiction to gambling sponsorship at the moment.

Watching 2011 AFL games, the inequities of player-initiated advantage are  plain for all to see. Advantage per se is a problematic concept to implement in Aussie rules anyway, but it’s definitely been taken a step too far.

To understand the inequities, it’s important to analyse how advantage works currently. The umpire blows his whistle for a free kick. If the ball has spilled to a member of the team receiving the free kick, and the umpire judges that the movement of the ball has been continuous, then advantage — player-initiated — is called.

Where the free kick is quite obvious, this system works, notwithstanding the merit or otherwise of the extent of the advantage provided.

However, when the free kick is indeterminate, whichever players have the ball or are contesting for the ball must turn their attention to one of three umpires to determine who will receive the free kick. If your team isn’t the recipient of the free kick, you’re in your back half and you kick the ball to an advantage situation without having seen the umpire’s signal, you gift the opposing team a 50-metre penalty and a gimme shot for goal.

So, player-initiated advantage is really only a benefit if it is a clear cut free kick and you’re in your forward half. Pardon us as small-‘l’ liberals, but we think that raises all sorts of inequities.

But we can go a step further and consider the whole notion of advantage in Aussie rules. As things stand at present, umpires blow their whistles for every decision that they make — even a mark in clear space where the player is odds-on to take the ball and immediately play-on is whistled as a mark.

Players have been conditioned through their entire careers to stop on the whistle. Rules have been introduced to reinforce that conditioned behaviour.

We aren’t expert in any other games — many would say not in Aussie rules either — but advantage seems to be dealt with more sensibly in other football codes. In rugby, for instance, it appears that the referee will hold off whistling to see how a particular piece of play unfolds. If the team receiving the penalty is advantaged by subsequent play, the referee indicates advantage has been awarded — without a whistle — and play continues. Both soccer and rugby league seem to follow a similar process.

We are also seeing player-initiated advantage being called by umpires on the most spurious evidence, such that, sometimes, there is an actual disadvantage, but this is an interpretation effect rather than a consequence of the advantage concept.

In the same way that video-assisted decision making doesn’t suit the flow of Aussie rules, advantage doesn’t suit the traditional umpiring style of Aussie rules.

We are certainly not in favour of so-called professional free kicks given away to slow opponents’ advances, but we are just as certain that the pendulum has been swung too far.

Jeff Gieschen has a problem. Not one of his own making this time, but one delivered by the Rules of the Game Committee.

On a number of occasions during the pres-season competition Grand Final, players were penalised for attempting to tackle opponents behind the mark. In and of itself, AussieRulesBlog has no issue with that decision.

This scenario becomes difficult when we have player-initiated advantage.

As things stand at the moment, the player initiating advantage by playing on, regardless of the whistle, cannot be tackled until his opponents hear the “Play on” or “Advantage” call. The penalty, either a hefty 50 metres or a huge advantage to the other team, is too much of a penalty.

The problem may not be of Gieschen’s making, but his umpires, thus far at least, don’t seem to be umpiring this scenario with logic and consistency in mind.

Some time ago, we mentioned in passing the logical disconnect between the umpire-adjudicated advantage rule and 50-metre penalties for those who either judge the umpire’s intent incorrectly and kick the ball on in anticipation of advantage or simply don’t hear the whistle — surely a plausible excuse in front of forty or fifty thousand screaming fans.

Keen students of the game will recall that a player-initiated advantage system was trialled in the pre-season competition this year.

A dozen or so games is insufficient to expose the inadequacies of a trial ruling, and it seems to AussieRulesBlog that the same problem remains in the player-initiated advantage schema: assumptions have to be made about what decision the umpire is about to deliver.

Were the umpires to be equipped with something resembling a miniature harmonica, with one tone for a free kick to team A and another for a free kick to team B, it would be reasonable to penalise a team whose player kicked the ball on in defiance of the whistle tone. In the absence of such a device, and with the capricious nature of many current interpretations, penalties for attempting to initiate an advantage situation verge on the ridiculous.

Let’s go further however and question the legitimacy of advantage as a concept. There isn’t a vanilla-style, one-size-fits-all scenario for advantage, although teams — and their fans — are quick to criticise perceived disadvantage when play is halted and brought back for a free kick.

Too often for AussieRulesBlog’s liking, the team gaining the advantage does so out of a combination of blind, capricious luck and their opponents having stopped on the sound of the whistle.

The fact is that most footballers have been taught to play to the whistle. When you hear the whistle, you stop what you’re doing and turn to the umpire to determine what will happen. For the umpire to suddenly decide that a player who has fortuitously gained free possession of the ball thirty metres in the clear is part of “continuous play” flies in the face of concepts like natural justice and fair play.

It’s our assessment that the rule, as it is currently umpired, is unduly advantageous on too many occasions. (The exception is scenarios where a so-called professional free kick is given up in order to slow down the attacking team. We aren’t enthusiastic about leaning on the umpire’s judgement in these situations, but there isn’t a viable alternative and it’s appropriate that the professional free kick is discouraged. We must also rely on the umpire’s judgement, unfortunately, for feined non-hearing of the whistle, since a kick against the direction of the free kick provides ample time for defenders to organise themselves.) We also note that the current interpretations favour apparently capricious and seemingly random application of the rule.