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.

Our blogging colleague Jermayn Parker, from Kick-2-Kick blog, comments on our post regarding consideration of a 10-team final series, “Australians love their finals though, don’t we?”

We think he has a point, but these days that love is more often than not only expressed through the lens of supporting their own team.

When we were nipping round the knees of our sainted father, we were taken to the finals when there was a final 4 and only one game each weekend in September. Yes, back in the 60s.

Among our fondest memories of those experiences was turning up at the ‘G’ and seeing a kaleidoscope of colour as supporters of pretty much every team in the competition came to the game to watch a couple of the best teams for the year battle it out. Even the First Semi-Final, between the third- and fourth-placed teams, drew this sort of crowd.

Of course we also remember standing on empty steel beer cans in the outer so we could see and, one dark winter afternoon in the Ryder stand at Victoria Park, peeing into an empty drink can because the stairways were jammed with troglodyte Barcodes supporters! But we digress. . .

We know those halcyon days can’t be reclaimed, but we are sorry that the spirit of wanting to watch a good game of football, regardless of the teams involved, has been overtaken by such parochial support that watching one’s own favourite team is the only football many people see — even on television.

Like some sideshow spruiker, the AFL is considering a 10-team final series in 2012 when the GWS Giants join the elite competition. Andrew, let’s just call the whole season a final series and then everyone can join in the fun!

As has been amply demonstrated in recent years, the teams finishing in the bottom half of the current 8-team final series are pretty much just making up the numbers. It’s difficult to imagine that a team could win a Premiership from position 5 or 6, let alone 7 or 8.

It would appear that one of the considerations is keeping as many fans as possible interested for as long as possible, thus, the more teams involved in post-home-and-away-season action the better.

AussieRulesBlog is firmly of the view that final series have been more ordinary, especially in the first two weeks, since the introduction of the final 8. We can only express our fear that a final 10 would produce even more meaningless wastes of time that fans would have to pay through the nose for.

Here’s an idea, Andrew! Let’s make the final series a showcase of the very best teams in the competition pitted against each other in winner-takes-all contests. You know, something like the old final 4!

It’s hard not to sympathise with the attitude of Melbourne FC regarding Casey Scorpions’ signing of Brendan Fevola. And yet, as AussieRulesBlog has previously noted, football may very well be Fevola’s best route back from the brink.

The Demons’ public objections centre on development of their young forward prospects being jeopardised. No doubt they have other, less public, objections such as the potential for Fevola to influence their youngsters — and who could blame them, again.

There isn’t an easy answer here: the best interests of Melbourne FC and its youthful recruits versus the interests of Casey and of Fevola.

As we’ve also previously noted, despite their many differences, there are synergies between Fevola’s situation and that of Ben Cousins two years ago. It would be a hard judge who would deny that Cousins’ involvement with the Tigers, as both player and mentor, did not benefit both parties.

It would be more than churlish to deny such an opportunity to Fevola.

Whatever the merits of giving Fevola another chance, this disagreement brings into stark contrast the difficulties of VFL clubs, many the remnants of the old VFA, being tied to AFL clubs. In return for their dollars, the AFL clubs expect preferential treatment.

Already a number of AFL clubs have decided they are better served fielding their own, fully-integrated VFL teams. This must be making the administrators of current VFL clubs pretty nervous. Frankston appears to be almost a basket case. Port Melbourne, the most likely to continue to survive in the long term as a standalone, faces the rapid gentrification of the suburb that might be the death of a thousand cuts for the proud Burroughs.

The AFL, as custodians of the game, have some real difficulties here and we don’t envy them the task one little bit. The quality of the VFL as a feeder and development competition to the elite AFL level is, arguably, pretty poor. But the obvious alternatives are financially and logistically difficult and may leave the middle tiers of the game in a parlous state.

We await developments.

Back in December of 2009, AussieRulesBlog railed against the proposal for video-assisted goal umpiring decisions. Once again, the practical application of the rule has demonstrated how flawed that proposal, now implemented, was.

Past applications of the rule have, mostly, involved deciding whether the ball has passed completely over the goal line or struck a goal post (although an incident early in the 2011 pre-season competition followed a similar trajectory to this one — Ed.). These are quite finite, immoveable objects and, at least relatively, easy to judge the position of a ball at relatively low velocity against.

Not content with that scenario, Gieschen’s mob decided to up the ante on Friday night and query a ball being touched just as it left a player’s boot. Let’s just assume that the ball is travelling at about 40m/s in that initial instant. If the TV cameras are capturing the action at, say, 25 frames per second, simple arithmetic shows that the ball will have moved about 1.6 metres between two adjacent frames — 0.04 of a second. And we’re supposed to accept that the video judge was able to discern the ball being touched in a grainy, jerky sequence of video frames?

Come on Jeff, Adrian, Andrew. This is nonsense.

Not only is the premise that a decision can be made in this instance nonsense, but the interminable wait for a decision that we presume, in this instance, was to award the lesser result because the video was inconclusive compounded the problem. For the last 130 years that has been a goal and nothing was seen to indicate that it wasn’t a goal in this instance.

And let us just mention again that a team awarded a point has much less opportunity for a video referral since the game is restarted these days almost before the goal umpire has signalled his decision. And the team kicking out if a behind is awarded have lost any advantage of a quick exit from their defensive zone as their opponents have a couple of minutes to perfect their defensive zone.

When are you people going to grasp that, despite Hawkins’ glancing goal in the 2010 Grand Final, single incidents don’t win or lose games and so this futile attempt to reduce an estimated current error rate of 0.1% across a whole season is a turkey.

Further to our previous post focussing on Nick Riewoldt’s new goalkicking routine, we had the chance to watch him at fairly close quarters on Friday night — great effort, Bombers!. He only had one (or perhaps two?) set shots during the game, but we were watching closely during the Saints’ warmup before the game.

We think he’s basically on the right track, but the follow through action of the leg is somewhat exaggerated — as it would be for someone who is embracing a ‘non-natural’ action.

The additional area that might still need focus is to ensure that his eyes are actually open at the point of impact. We noted that the set shot taken during the game missed the target by a considerable distance.

To return to the golf analogy we used in the previous post, we find that we have an instinctive reaction to blink right at the point of impact of the golf clubhead and ball.

When we blink, our success rate is way less than 50%, however, when we can convince our eyes to stay open right through the impact, our success rate (the ball flying straight and true in the intended direction) is approaching 100%. It goes without saying that even this incentive does not keep our eyes open!!

We also made the point about open eyes to Matthew Knights last year when the Bombers had the ‘yips’ in front of goal.

There’s some pretty interesting research just waiting to be done here.

We’ll take a hefty punt that current Bomber and ex-Hawk, Mark Williams, renowned for his sharpshooting, has his eyes firmly open and on the ball as he kicks for goal.

AussieRulesBlog has been aware of some discussion over recent months of goal kicking. Some commentators have opined that kicking for goal is perhaps the one area of AFL that has not developed with the increased professionalism of players over the last decade and a half.

Bringing that discussion to mind again are articles in todays Hun commenting on St kilda captain Nick Riewoldt’s refashioned goalkicking routine.

In his newly-unveiled routine, Riewoldt intentionally does not look at the target once he has commenced his run in.

AussieRulesBlog is particularly interested in this routine. We wrote to then-Essendon coach Matthew Knights when the Bombers seemed to have a whole-of-list case of the ‘yips’ a couple of years ago.

In that letter, we drew Knights’ attention to another ball game — golf. It is a maxim of golf that the player watches the ball right through the moment of clubface impact. We know from our own occasional efforts at the game that achieving this feat increases the likelihood of an acceptable shot by around 10,000%. On the other hand, looking where we expect the ball to be (mostly before we’ve hit it) increases the likelihood of suicidal thoughts by the same 10,000%.

The simple fact is, both hitting the golf ball and kicking a football are exercises in hand/foot/body and eye co-ordination. That extraordinary organ, the human brain, is able to manage incredible precision if it is not distracted. Looking up to see where we’ve hit or kicked the ball distracts it!

It’s no surprise that the Hun article draws a contrast between Riewoldt and Travis Cloke. Cloke’s inaccuracy is legendary. Barcodes supporters can often be heard muttering murderous thoughts as Cloke misses yet another ‘easy’ shot.

Cloke has a fairly ‘organic’ goalkicking routine. He leans back at the point of contact and, as a result, his ball drop is unpredictable at best. Lance Franklin is a similarly ‘organic’ kicker. By contrast, the forwards with 1000+ goals (or nearly) — Lockett, Dunstall, Ablett, McKenna, Lloyd — invariably are upright and watching the ball onto the boot as they kick.

We mentioned at the outset some opinions that goalkicking had not kept pace with other advances in player professionalism. Perhaps this can be explained by the penchant in the last couple of decades for recruiting athletes who could play a bit of football as much as physical conditioning coaches limiting goalkicking practice by  getting players off the training track early.

Sadly, AussieRulesBlog is old enough to recall the kicking segment on World of Sport where the legendary Bruce Andrew was a judge and commentator on the show’s kicking competition. As we recall, a straight runup and a straight ball drop were among the keys to effective and accurate kicking.

We think Riewoldt will see a significant improvement in his conversions percentage with this technique. We also hope that others take note and develop their own versions of the routine.

Compounding the confusion of Brisbane’s sacking of Brendan Fevola, it now appears that the prima facie reason for the sacking, charges out of his New Year’s Eve engagement with the Police, are to be dropped.

So, once more we have an AFL club taking extraordinarily drastic action, throwing a person’s life into a maelstrom, before a pronouncement of “Guilty!” Is this to be a habit? Will AFL clubs now dispense summary justice on a whim?

Neither Fevola nor Andrew Lovett are choir boys, yet surely they’re entitled to the same presumptions of legal process that the rest of us expect as our due.