I despise the goal review system. For all the complaints I might have had about umpiring over the years, precisely zero related to goal umpires. But, alas, we now spend minutes at a time forensically examining blurry and poorly-angled replays, while frequently failing to determine anything at all.
Meanwhile there are four yellow elephants in the room, stomping around and genuinely ruining matches. That 'out-on-the-full' against LDU today changed the game; until that moment, there was a winless team, with some momentum and belief, mounting something of a challenge with the scores level against a side that played finals last year. But then along comes that abomination of a free-kick that resulted in a goal, and the game turned for good.
That the game may have been turning anyway, or that an improved mental-resilience might have curtailed the resulting run-on is beside the point; the scoreboard, and by extension the game, was wrongly influenced no less than it would be by the kind of goal-umpiring error that so much effort is expended trying to prevent.
Why do we not have NRL-style captain's challenges? Howlers like today's would be promptly reversed, and games less often artificially determined by objectively wrong and unfair umpiring decisions. As it is, we fart around solving a problem that rarely exists, while ignoring the one that blatantly does.
Just suppose Lachie Neal was able to challenge that nonsensical 'advantage' decision in last year's GF...
Meanwhile there are four yellow elephants in the room, stomping around and genuinely ruining matches. That 'out-on-the-full' against LDU today changed the game; until that moment, there was a winless team, with some momentum and belief, mounting something of a challenge with the scores level against a side that played finals last year. But then along comes that abomination of a free-kick that resulted in a goal, and the game turned for good.
That the game may have been turning anyway, or that an improved mental-resilience might have curtailed the resulting run-on is beside the point; the scoreboard, and by extension the game, was wrongly influenced no less than it would be by the kind of goal-umpiring error that so much effort is expended trying to prevent.
Why do we not have NRL-style captain's challenges? Howlers like today's would be promptly reversed, and games less often artificially determined by objectively wrong and unfair umpiring decisions. As it is, we fart around solving a problem that rarely exists, while ignoring the one that blatantly does.
Just suppose Lachie Neal was able to challenge that nonsensical 'advantage' decision in last year's GF...
