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.