Triple MMM Commentary - The Ballantyne decision

[Suntory Boss Coffee]

Well they did with other decisions that night, so why not this one?

Just because 1 person gets away with a crime doesn't mean another should.

 

[bungholes_premiers]

Watch the start of the game and Ballantine was making an aggro little pest of himself from the very start. You can understand why they were keeping a close eye on him.

/thread

 

[asanque]

The AFL said it was the correct decision.
http://www.afl.com.au/news/2015-09-29/a-blocks-a-block-stevic-defends-ballantyne-decision

Not only that Stevic was chosen as a grand final umpire.

Fremantle definitely got the rub of the green in the third quarter.

People should look at the Roos v WCE game for bad umpiring where none of the umpires were chosen for the GF.

 

[Freoforever86]

Just because 1 person gets away with a crime doesn't mean another should.

My point too. I don't think it would have changed the result, but hate seeing soft free like that paid.
Walter tackled without it and nothing.

Ah well.

 

[Hoops]

Yeah, this. Umpires aren't stupid. They know who the antagonisers are out in the ground, and who hands out the cheap ones.

I'm not sure the umpire would've even seen the initial contact. What they most likely saw was Suckling on his way to the ground or already there, and Ballantyne only inches away....they then blew the whistle, thinking that a free was deserved for taking a player down off the ball.

So of course, it looks soft when you see the replay, but the umpire clearly made a split second decision "we're not gong to have players felled off the ball", and I'm not sure that's such a bad one.

Killing momentum and gifting your team a goal. Of course that wasn't a bad one.

 

[bungholes_premiers]

i rather soft ones paid so that the best players in the comp can actually play the game without having a turd giving nipple cripples just cos theres no explicit rule against it.

It would also stop the week long conversation about whether a hack tagger would play or not

 

[Hoops]

This is very simple. Rule 15.4.5 states that "A field Umpire shall award a Free Kick against a Player where they are satisfied that the Player has made Prohibited Contact with an opposition Player. A Player makes Prohibited Contact with an opposition Player if the Player:
(e) pushes, bumps, holds or blocks an opposition Player when the football is further than 5 metres away from the opposition Player or is out of play;".

Easy call for the umpire and 100% right. Players away from the ball should be permitted to move freely around the ground.

So they get another 80 non-calls wrong a game?

 

[Hoops]

The AFL said it was the correct decision.
http://www.afl.com.au/news/2015-09-29/a-blocks-a-block-stevic-defends-ballantyne-decision

Not only that Stevic was chosen as a grand final umpire.

Fremantle definitely got the rub of the green in the third quarter.

People should look at the Roos v WCE game for bad umpiring where none of the umpires were chosen for the GF.

No, the Freo V Hawks umpiring was just as bad

 

[andrew coombs]

Killing momentum and gifting your team a goal. Of course that wasn't a bad one.

A you describing the free against Ballantine or Sheridans melt in the last quarter?

 

[Back One Out]

Way to go! A 2000 word post of nothing other than banal dribble showing you completely didn't get the intention or topic of the thread. Comprehension fail.

Your post is banal dribble. Not mine. I addressed the OP's thread topic within my post and also addressed the subtext of the thread (biased pro-Hawk umps). If you actually read it and were able to process 2 or 3 ideas, then you would realise that. It was only 500 words; not 2000. But for someone who can't read, 500 words probably seems like 2000.

Comprehension fail, right back at ya.

 

[asanque]

No, the Freo V Hawks umpiring was just as bad

Apparently the AFL disagree.

Alternatively, the umpires in WCE v Roos were just far worse.

Edit:
Arguably the Hawks got a good run in the first quarter.
It was pretty even for the other 3 quarters.
This was spelled out in the free kick count where there was 1 different.

Contrast to the Eagles v Roos, where the Roos were shafted for the entire game.
They got a few softies in the end but still ended up around 6 down.

 

[andrew coombs]

Wow, this Fremantle fans wine has gone on to seven pages. As they say: Winners are grinners and losers ( including several bitterly envious fans of, surprise, surprise Geelong and Essendon) can spend the next week bitching about an umpiring decision 12 minutes into a 120 minute game.

 

[estibador]

Just because 1 person gets away with a crime doesn't mean another should.

The umps certainly agreed with you there on Friday.

Just because they let Hawthorn get away with 10m kicks all night didn't mean they were going to let Freo do it.

 

[Suntory Boss Coffee]

The umps certainly agreed with you there on Friday.

Just because they let Hawthorn get away with 10m kicks all night didn't mean they were going to let Freo do it.

Wah wah wah. Get over it. There is no umpire directive to favour Hawthorn.

 

[wowlace]

Happens in all games. Bullshit soft 50s or frees that result in 100% chance of a goal. You just have a whinge for a minute and move on. We don't need threads about it.

 

[woosha24]

Jesus Christ, why has this gone on for so many pages!?

Freo fans - the Ballantyne decision didnt cost you the game. It was in the first quarter, and you lot were in front. Did it cost you "momentum"? Sure, maybe. But if you couldnt arrest the momentum and shift it back your way over the course of 3 f*cking quarters, then your team simply arent good enough. Ballantyne is a niggly little sh*t, and he had been a niggly little sh*t several times during the quarter until the umpires finally got sick of it and pinged him for being a niggly little sh*t. The free kick against him is the result of his, and solely his, stupidity for taking it too far.

Hawthorn won because they were the better team, and their gamestyle is generally considered the "paper" to your "rock". The umpires werent instructed to get them over the line, and your lot were generally second to the ball for the majority of the night and made several costly errors in your forward half.

And before any of you start, if West Coast lose on Saturday it wont be cause of "da umpyres" either. It will be because Hawthorn were the bettern team. Same as if West Coast win.

 

[romeohwho]

Watch the start of the game and Ballantine was making an aggro little pest of himself from the very start. You can understand why they were keeping a close eye on him. His MO is usually to try and antagonise opposition players into giving away a free.

Whilst I jumped up and down at the time, I can see that the decision is correct. He looked at and then ran directly at the Hawthorn player (Smith or Suckling ??). Even though it was not a hard bump and the "victim" put a fair bit of mayo on it, it was against the rules - too bad so sad for Ballantine got caught. Undisciplined.

The other umpire speaking in the audio would have been he emergency umpire sitting near the interchange, not some nuffie off the street sitting upstairs, as JB would like to think. That umpire would have been watching for off the ball incidents and would have seen Ballantine in action earlier in the game. As a result he would mention to the umpires on the field to keep an eye on him possibly infringing. Happens all the time and exactly what the other 2 umpires are supposed to be looking for.

Yep buy why pay it in a final after 5 years of ignoring it?

 

[The Swans Blog]

Brilliant idea. Start a thread about biased umpiring towards Hawthorn and expect Hawk fans to not bite.

****ing poor umpiring all season and finals, nothing is going to change, especially this weekend. Piss weak momentum calls will be made to Hawthorn and physically rough calls where players would normally be fined won't even be called for West Coast players.

 

[Back One Out]

Happens in all games. Bullshit soft 50s or frees that result in 100% chance of a goal. You just have a whinge for a minute and move on. We don't need threads about it.

The hysteria tends to ratchet up 100 notches on the penultimate weekend of the year, especially when it's a despised club such as Hawthorn who is the perceived beneficiary.

The real issue for many people is that Hawthorn reached another Grand Final. That's the main source of discontent. So they vent their spleen over a couple of umpiring decisions and throw their anonymous infantile tantrums.

Ask yourself, would anyone apart from Hawk fans even remember if Freo received a couple of gifts from the umpires in the 1st quarter, won the game by 6 goals and stormed into the Grand final vs West Coast? There would no issue. Nothing said about it.

Everything is always so laughably exaggerated on the internet. Funny as hell to read the Geelong and Sydney match threads and see their level of angst, bitterness and hatred towards Hawthorn.

 

[caitsith01]

Personally I think the word momentum is over used. It is a convenient way of using a debatable umpire decision as an excuse.

Every little contest can swing the game and therefore 'momentum'.

So you don't think that games have clearly discernable periods in which one team wrestles control of the game and plays it on that team's terms for between 5 and 120 minutes at a time?

 

[smeltitdeltit]

Jesus Christ, why has this gone on for so many pages!?

Freo fans - the Ballantyne decision didnt cost you the game. It was in the first quarter, and you lot were in front. Did it cost you "momentum"? Sure, maybe. But if you couldnt arrest the momentum and shift it back your way over the course of 3 f*cking quarters, then your team simply arent good enough. Ballantyne is a niggly little sh*t, and he had been a niggly little sh*t several times during the quarter until the umpires finally got sick of it and pinged him for being a niggly little sh*t. The free kick against him is the result of his, and solely his, stupidity for taking it too far.

Hawthorn won because they were the better team, and their gamestyle is generally considered the "paper" to your "rock". The umpires werent instructed to get them over the line, and your lot were generally second to the ball for the majority of the night and made several costly errors in your forward half.

And before any of you start, if West Coast lose on Saturday it wont be cause of "da umpyres" either. It will be because Hawthorn were the bettern team. Same as if West Coast win.

quoted for PERSPECTIVE

 

[caitsith01]

Brilliant idea. Start a thread about biased umpiring towards Hawthorn and expect Hawk fans to not bite.

******* poor umpiring all season and finals, nothing is going to change, especially this weekend. Piss weak momentum calls will be made to Hawthorn and physically rough calls where players would normally be fined won't even be called for West Coast players.

This weekend will be like finding out what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object... which way with the umpires flog it up? Scientists from the LHC project will be watching this quantum mechanical interaction with interest.

 

[caitsith01]

Did it cost you "momentum"? Sure, maybe. But if you couldnt arrest the momentum and shift it back your way over the course of 3 f*cking quarters, then your team simply arent good enough.

You have literally no way of knowing how this would have played out. No-one does. If that free wasn't paid, maybe Freo gets another goal straight away, and then wins the next centre bounce, and suddenly the Hawks are panicking and start infringing more while their gameplan breaks down. Freo's nerves settle and they control the game for long enough to get a match winning lead.

And the whole 'if you can't win with bad decisions going against you you don't deserve to win' thing is simply illogical. It's basically like saying, "if you can't win with someone arbitrarily subtracting points off your score, you don't deserve to win".

Let's say two teams are exactly equal, and a game of footy has enough randomness in it to produce, on average, a draw. I.e., you play them off 1000 times and the average score is 90-90. Now if you add in bad umpiring which is worth 2 goals to one of them, suddenly the average score is going to be 102-90. The teams are still equal, but one of them will tend to win and one tend to lose.

 

[Mr Meeseeks]

So you don't think that games have clearly discernable periods in which one team wrestles control of the game and plays it on that team's terms for between 5 and 120 minutes at a time?

Well obviously. Thats just playing better footy imo, not momentum.

Momentum is something a snowball has rolling down a hill, building and building towards a crescendo. Its a force, I think its a bit simplistic to apply it to sport, especially AFL where there are so many variables in every contest.

Players may drop their heads or lift their intensity, or run out of puff, or get a lucky bounce of the ball, or get a poor decision. These are the variables that give a game its ebbs and flows, not some unseen force that can supposedly be ripped away from one umpires decision.

 

[Mr Meeseeks]

You have literally no way of knowing how this would have played out. No-one does. If that free wasn't paid, maybe Freo gets another goal straight away, and then wins the next centre bounce, and suddenly the Hawks are panicking and start infringing more while their gameplan breaks down. Freo's nerves settle and they control the game for long enough to get a match winning lead.

Agreed. But it goes both ways, what is to say Hawthorn dont galvanise and win by 60 points. See?

An umpiring decision early in the match has just as much influence on the rest of the game as the umpire recalling a bounce.