Getting goal umpiring decisions correct is so important that the AFL has all but confirmed that video referral will be implemented for the 2012 season. Lots of publicity for that announcement, however the silence has been deafening following the first video referral cock-up, in the West Coast–Essendon section of the Perth triple-header on Sunday.

It’ll be interesting to read responses from Jeff Gieschen and Adrian Anderson in coming days after a clearly incorrect goal umpiring decision in tonight’s West Coast v Essendon leg of the round one triple-header. Essendon’s Cory Dell'Olio, managed to make contact with the ball, below the knee,in the goalsquare, thus scoring a goal.

Despite there being, according to Adrian Anderson, an umpiring department staffer on hand with access to video replay, the goal umpire chose to make a decision — the wrong decision as it turns out on the video replay — on the spot.

We wonder what the instructions to goal umpires in Perth have been. Have they caught up with the news about video referral? Will Adrian Anderson consider resigning now that his much-vaunted video referral system has let through a howler? After all, he announced that the AFL would deploy the video technology in order to reduce errors.

Of course, AussieRulesBlog is partly tongue-in-cheek. The score made no difference to the result. The result was palpably unimportant.

We don’t agree with the decision to use video referral, but, if it’s there, why wasn’t it used to make sure we got the right decision?

Video Cock-up Number One. Don’t worry, dear reader, we’ll keep count for you.

It was, after all, only the first night of the pre-season competition, but we found ourselves once again shaking our head at free kicks for incidental contact.

As ‘Special K’ Hunt and ‘The Promised Land’ Folau will attest, Aussie rules is a 360° game and a physical game. Physical contact is part and parcel of the sport — unlike, for instance, basketball (even if only in the strictest sense).

Go out this weekend and find some netball being played. You’ll hear the referees whistling and calling “Contact!” That’s because it is a non-contact sport.

We understand that the AFL is determined to protect players’ heads, but we still can’t come to terms with a free kick paid for an incidental arm that brushes across a shoulder. It wouldn’t be so bad if every arm that brushed across a shoulder were similarly penalised, but they’re not. And there’s the rub!

If there are ‘infractions’ that are not being penalised, where is the line that an umpire uses to determine whether a particular incidental contact is worthy of a free kick?

In the end, for fans at the game, these decisions end up looking capricious at best because, even though we are much further away than the umpires, we see these incidental contacts throughout the game.

AussieRulesBlog seriously needed a live footy ‘fix’, so along with 28,000 others we rolled along to Docklands last night. We were also keen to see the AFL’s new experimental ruck rule in action for the first time.

As befits the first halfway-decent competitive hitout of the year, the footy was, mostly, pretty uninspiring. The experimental rule for boundary ruck contests was, in contrast, simply fantastic!

On a couple of occasions ruckmen forgot and touched before the ball was launched, but instant free kicks served their purpose.

The AFL can keep their video technology in a box at the back of their shed, but, as far as we’re concerned, they can implement this boundary ruck contest rule for the home and away season right now! Three ‘games’ last night should have everybody convinced this is a winner.

And isn’t it great to have footy back!

Continuing the theme, AussieRulesBlog spied this item on Foxsports ‘News’ page:

News? Who do they think they’re kidding? Undignified voyeurism at best.

This in The Age this morning:

ESSENDON is content with the progress it is making in contract talks with Michael Hurley, but it appears that the club does not want the star forward talking to the public about his future.

A media contingent at yesterday's NAB Cup launch expected to speak to the 21-year-old, who was a guest at the function held at his old club, the Macleod Junior Football Club.

Instead, the Bombers sent football manager Paul Hamilton at the last minute to field questions, most of which centred on Hurley's future beyond 2012.

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/afl/afl-news/bombers-believe-hurley-will-stay-20120214-1t467.html#ixzz1mPOvdV7A

As with reporting on the Federal political scene in recent years, it seems sports journalists have become fixated on sensation and controversy, often of their own making, to the exclusion of simply reporting.

Last year it was Tom Scully, every bloody week!!! Is it to be Michael Hurley this year? Can’t you vultures in the media simply wait until an announcement is made? Why do you have to speculate each and every week? You’re our conduit into the outskirts of the inner sanctums. Don’t spoil it by ignoring what there is to report in favour of writing speculative crap about your hobby horse topic. The football public deserve better than that from you.

Perhaps at the function mentioned in The Age’s story, the media contingent could have asked some questions about the pre-season competition? That is, after all, what the function was about. And then you have the hide to complain when Essendon protect their young star from the sort of bullying, pestering behaviour that seems to pass for journalism these days. Un-[expletive]-believable.

Just over one hundred hours until AFL for 2012 begins with the first of the pre-season round one mini lightning Premierships. At AussieRulesBlog Central, we’re as toey as a Roman sandal. It has been a long and, from a sporting perspective, pretty boring summer. It’s about time we saw some Aussie rules action around Australia.

A year is a very long time in football. This time last year, we were aghast at Brisbane’s decision to sack Brendan Fevola after losing Daniel Bradshaw and Michael Rischitelli as an indirect result of his recruitment, the Saints were denying problems with club culture after suspending four young players, Nick Riewoldt had unveiled a new, rather robotic, goal-kicking action, Jeff Gieschen was defending the worst implementation of video decision assistance yet seen on an AFL field, and we mourned the passing of Darrel Baldock.

2012 has been comparatively quiet by comparison. It would be nice for the main topic of discussion over the next few days to be footy. Fingers crossed.

For those without access to pay-TV, the pre-season is going to be very long and very frustrating, but it’s a sign of the times. It’s likely to be increasingly difficult for free-to-air television to generate a profit out of advertising revenue, especially given the production costs involved in covering AFL. It may be that this new broadcasting agreement that we’re beginning in 2012 is the last great media cash injection into the game as audiences fragment to new modes of access to broadcasts of the game. The recent court decision on rebroadcasting to mobile devices hints at where this media space is heading. Given the speed with which so-called smart phones have come to dominate less-clever alternatives, it’s not hard to imagine the potential impacts on free-to-air broadcasting.

Of course, the other ‘big’ change in broadcasting is that all games will be ‘live’ in 2012. Quite what real difference this makes, we can’t fathom, but it’s clearly a highly emotive matter to a large portion of the audience. One thing’s for sure, anyone complaining about scheduling of games should direct their wrath to the live-TV activists and their supporters.

So, bring on Friday night and the three-way clash between the Tiges, the Roos and the Hawks! Footy’s back!!!!

The Hun reports today that an off-field umpire’s department official, with access to video replay, will be hooked into the umpire’s audio system to assist in adjudicating “goal line” decisions during the 2012 pre-season competition. A 40-second window will be available for any video assessment which would be prior to the goal umpire signalling a decision. This means, and we think the AFL have taken a PR view of this, no decisions will be overturned as a result of video referral. Whatever we think of the general concept, and AussieRulesBlog thinks it’s a mangy dog, the final part is a PR masterstroke.

Let’s hope that we don’t have a repeat of last year’s nonsense of video replays being used to try to determine whether a hand has touched a kicked ball fifteen metres out from goal. Goal line decisions only please, if we must go through this nonsense.

The story in the Hun drags up the 2011 Sharrod Wellingham Grand Final goal that apparently deflected off a goal post and the 2009 Tom Hawkins GF poster. Are these “goal line” decisions? Will the “goal line” cameras be sited such that they can be used to adjudicate decisions like the two mentioned? If the arrangement is similar to 2011, the cameras are attached to the goal post about 2.5 metres above ground level to assist in those “did he touch it before it went over the line” decisions. Pretty typical, in our view, of the journalist responsible for this report to bring in red herrings and create expectations that probably can’t be met, because it’s all about the “controversy”.

The truth is, the technology and this application of it has holes you could drive a B-double through. When we’re hardly being deluged with incorrect decisions in every game — remember that errors are running at something less than one tenth of one percent of all scoring decisions across an entire season — all of this additional cost and infrastructure will achieve . . . precisely bugger-all. It’s the standard response dictated by the AFL Management Handbook — use the biggest sledgehammer you can find to crack a tiny grain of sand.