Okay you need me to spell it out one step at a time,
Don't mistake disagreement for incomprehension. Just because I disagree with your opinion doesn't mean I don't understand it.
hardly surprising given that you were a forward (just kidding, but really if you think holding on is 'cheating' you must have been a very unhappy footballer).
Put it this way. When I was held on to, and I knew the umpire saw it, I expected to get a free kick. More often than not I did, although it didn't happen that often, esp when I was younger, as I had a huge size advantage and could easily dispatch most defenders. I was an early sprouter. In the seniors though, it was a different story.
Simple really - in a large number of contests someone will technically infringe a rule (as I explained before). An interventionist (technically correct) umpire would then be blowing his whistle every 60 seconds for a free kick.
I'm not asking for this. I'm asking that the AFL umpires follow the guidelines put out by the AFL at the start of each season. According to those guidelines, the holding of a player after an uncontested mark is worth a 50m penalty. So again, why would the umpire be "intelligent" by refusing to pay such a decision?
The ump obviously thought it insignificant and that being the case ruled, as I would like them always to rule, with common sense/intelligence. Perhaps he was technically wrong but as I've said I don't agree with technical umpiring.
Which has a tendency to create inconsistency, as all umpires will have their own opinion on what is and isn't significant. Only by saying "holding a player after an uncontested mark is always significant" can inconsistency be reduced.
Besides, as a forward I know, the only way an umpire could tell whether or not it's significant would be to know what the forward was thinking at the time. If there was a player down field that the forward was looking to get the ball to, and the illegal tackle prevented that, then that's significant. If the umpire was unaware of this, then he may rule decide that it was insignificant.
Ho hum, wrong conclusion. Here's a piece of elementary logic for you. Umpires rarely make mistakes in their adjudications, despite what we like to think. Their biggest mistakes are in not awarding free kicks in similar situations (ie inconsistency). When they 'swallow the whistle' their consistency improves since they let most minor infringements go and only penalise significant transgressions. Ergo the more technical they get the worse their performance.
You've assumed a linear relationship between technicality of decisions and consistency. As there is no such linear relationship, your conclusion is meaningless. You've also assumed they rarely make mistakes. If that was the case, we wouldn't be discussing it.
If your solution is for umpires to swallow the whistle and pay nothing, then that would make them rather redundant. And what happen on a regular basis when they do this? They end up paying some soft free kick, often that wasn't there at all. This cancels out any consistency gained by swallowing the whistle
Funny isn't it that commentators and fans always talk about that terrific passage of play or game almost always when the umps let the game flow. Now why is that?
I think this is another false assumption. Is there a direct correlation between swallowed whistle and terrific passage of play? Do we not see terrific passage of play when the whistle hasn't been swallowed, but no infringements are occurring? It appears you're arguing for the dispensing of free kicks all together.