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Agree. The only way that there's a suspension is if the notion of "duty of care" and "elects to bump" means the player is responsible for any consequences, regradless of whether the contact is direct.

That's very very difficult to adjudicate IMO. You can see exactly how he could get concussed with whiplash, but I don't think there's contact.

We have had grey areas in the game for as long as we have had the game. This isn't cricket, where the ball either hit the bat or it didn't, or it was going on to hit the stumps or it wasn't. It's football, which is dynamic, evolving, and complex to adjudicate. I don't think the AFL needs to...

Concussion and CTE is caused by the impact of the brain against the inside of the skull as the head cops whiplash. That's why car accident victims can have concussion even without a big head impact. Helmets actually make it worse, because then players tend to lead with the head and treat their...

No, I don't think it will ever get to the point of all concussions necessarily invoking a suspension. As some have pointed out, you cannot eliminate concussion from contact sport completely. What the AFL is doing, is eliminating acts which are vastly more likely to cause concussion - such as...

Because the umpire at that level is a 19yo skinny spotty kid and we are talking about a pack of half a dozen grown men shouting abuse. It’s extremely difficult to police.

Not the original commenter, but I play soccer (far too small and slow for footy) and the referee abuse there is another level. Seemingly the combination of extremely high stakes (given what a goal is worth) and very low permissible contact (which encourages diving) makes for an awful experience...

Yeah on that front I feel like my club just about owes the AFL an apology

Generally I like it as it does encourage players to play on a lot more. Whatever the mechanism, footy seems better to watch than it did two years ago.

I think being an interstate side is generally a hinderance during H&A if you're a good team, and a boost if you're struggling. Being an interstate team basically exacerbates home ground advantage, whether it's for you or against you. So, it makes 11 games/year much easier to win, and 11...

Yes, but the non-Vic sides have to be vastly superior, IMO, to win it. Home ground advantage doesn't magically disappear on GF day.

Hawkins was extremely lucky not to miss games earlier this year for that errant elbow.

I think it's more just inconsistency than any state-based bias. Victorians just aren't that patriotic about their state, especially not when they're the biggest footballing state in the country by quite some margin. The only time I've heard more one-sided support for a single team at the pub in...

I think people sometimes forget that umpires are also footy nuts just like anyone else. The perceived poor standard of umpiring says a lot more about how tough the game is to interpret, rather than deficiencies in the umpires themselves IMO.

No. It takes a lot of practice and training to become a competent umpire. It’s like saying that a pilot can become an air traffic controller overnight. The two roles work together, but it is a completely different skill set.

Because Mark Blicavs was making Geelong's lack of a good ruckman slightly irrelevant (And, yes, blocking etc)

That is a factor I hadn't thought of - that full-time umpiring will set people back in their chosen career. Umpiring isn't a lifelong dedication in the same way that being a footballer is.

No. You're asking whether a black person called another black person a "black c***" is racist, that has nothing to do with calling an umpire a green maggot when that clearly has no reference to skin colour or racial origin?

Completely agree. You'd have Collingwood just continually bombing it to the square for Cox to punch it through time and again.

Der, of course it is. But how is that relevant to this green maggot thing?

It's also that AFL is probably the hardest game to umpire that I can possibly think of, for a few reasons: It's a contact sport 36 players on the field at once Highly officiated (as opposed to the likes of rugby et al) Rules are very grey and open to seasonal interpretation change There's...

I honestly think that's detrimental for the umpires - then they just become faceless autobots that we don't know, but feel completely free to abuse the crap out of. At the end of the day, the footy is always, and always has been, the centre of attention. Ray Chamberlain cracking a joke to a...

He's not an attention hog, just you and BT are over-sensitive. Let's face it, we couldn't name one other umpire who actually has any form of personality.

And, for what its worth, when it comes to the public treatment of umpires one of the worst things is that we forget they're human. Actually showing a fraction of personability and a sense of humour doesn't hurt. His reaction to copping one downstairs on the weekend was first-class.

How dare someone have two-fifths of a semblance of a personality. Let's face it, we ask umpires to not exist until we want to give them an absolute barrage of abuse, I'm not going to get too hot under the collar about the fact that he was heard coaching another umpire.

Yeah, that's how I read that rule as well - that the verb "to shake" implied holding it and pushing it from side to side, not a consequence of any other action. Nobody has actually looked at any footage of the bloody post to see if it actually shakes. 100% that it *should* be a free kick for...

Funny enough, nobody has managed it yet in 150 years of trying.

Because of the pressure of the situation. Same way that players make stupid decisions when the margin is under a goal and there's under a minute left, like trying to baulk Fraser Brown or Buckley passing to Rocca with the scores level.

Our game is a chaotic, 360-degree non-direction high-velocity stacks-on full contact sport. It's probably the hardest game to umpire that I can think of. There are probably community noticeboards with this exact ad on them dating back to 1897 somewhere. It's old as the hills and it's trying to...

Yes! Exactly this, for mine. Could you imagine if it had actually been paid?