Analysis Umpires

[Pater44]

You had me until your inbred comment. Says more about you than the umpires. Stick to talking football.

It was a joke in regards to the perceived view on umpires and thinking they are somewhat different people. A little light hearted ness in that point only considering our rough trot with calls this season. I was sarcastic just in that point. The rest I am dead set on...


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[happydude]

At the Port Melbourne game there was a moment the umpire paid a mark to a player after a hand ball (his vision was blocked at the moment the player passed the ball.)

Players from both teams told him he'd made the mistake so the umpire apoligsed for the error and threw the ball up.

The umpire got a small clap from the supporters near enough to know what was happening.

This goes to show that it's not the mistakes that rile people up. It's the blurred lines of interpretation and the AFL constantly not admitting to errors and claiming they are always right that frustrates fans.

Issues about the game IMO come from the rules committee level but umpires become the face of the issue at the live game.


It will never be perfect but it can be Alot better

 

[thylacine60]

once the afl admits decisions are wrong grandfinals end up in court, don't they?

 

[happydude]

once the afl admits decisions are wrong grandfinals end up in court, don't they?

Only in the most extreme example and there's nothing preventing that right now if such an extreme example were to happen.
The goal post climbing incident but in the grand final.

Even then that's like being scared about being hit by lightning twice when you haven't been struck the first time

 

[DamianBis]

All I need is for the umpire bosses to come out and say "hey we made 46 mistakes on the weekend" "X were minor mistakes y were blatantly wrong"

Admit problems. show us that you can do that otherwise we have no idea that you're trying to improve.

I'm really hoping that they have these metrics even if it's only internal currently.

If the problem is that way too many of the rules are 50/50 then the rules committee need to get their shit together and fix it

Interesting thought. What percentage of the rules committee have umpired at a high level?

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[DangerousD]

Ok so over the off season the AFL made around 10 changes to rules of the game and how it is to be played. None have made the game any more appealing, easier to officiate or easier to be be more consistent. Let’s face it, consistency is what every fan wants. Players can adjust to how pedantic and/or lacklustre the official is for the day as long as they call it the same consistently.

As much as I hate the bald headed flog (on SEN being KB not the green maggot umpire) I think what he has been banging on about the interchange is totally correct. Remove the interchange dramatically to 4 or so a quarter. This has every effect we want and takes the game back to the glory days just like the early 90’s. Think of it, the main thing this brings back into the game is FATIGUE!!!!!!

Fatigue is needed for a number or reasons:
1. The game opens up. When players are tired they cannot get to every contest and will be forced to revert back to traditional positions.
2. Reduces collision impact by way of reducing top speed, reducing average speed and reducing repeat top speed efforts. I feel this will drastically reduce the amount of collision injuries and concussion.
3. This will see the return of the more traditional footballer rather than just the running athlete. I don’t care who you are, how fast you can run and how far you can run, when stuck on the ground the whole time you will get tired. Look at the players tonight after the game, half of them don’t even look tired. They get too much rest.
4. My favourite - reduce the number of umpires needed on the field. The reason the afl have up’d the number of umpires is that they want to make sure they can see every contest and judge what they see. They can’t call correctly if they are too far away. Hence increase the number of umpires on the field. I was at the game Saturday night and I counted 7 umpires on the field at the centre bounce. 3 in the square with one bouncing on diagonal and then one on each point of the square. It’s insane!!! How on earth can you ever have consistency in umpiring with 7 different people calling the game. I know they are all inbred animals and we can’t stand them but even they must have difference in opinion on what is what.

I know it’s probably been said but it needs to be said again... the only thing that is majorly different in the game now and what it had been for 100 years is the number of times the player come off for a rest...





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You’re aware that 4 of those umpires are boundary umps, don’t you?

 

[Gethelred]

Ok so over the off season the AFL made around 10 changes to rules of the game and how it is to be played. None have made the game any more appealing, easier to officiate or easier to be be more consistent. Let’s face it, consistency is what every fan wants. Players can adjust to how pedantic and/or lacklustre the official is for the day as long as they call it the same consistently.

AFL fans do not want consistency, they merely say that's what they want. What they want is more frees for their team, nothing more and nothing less; less frees overall, but more frees for them.

Whether that'd be good for the game, though, is entirely another thing.

As much as I hate the bald headed flog (on SEN being KB not the green maggot umpire) I think what he has been banging on about the interchange is totally correct. Remove the interchange dramatically to 4 or so a quarter. This has every effect we want and takes the game back to the glory days just like the early 90’s. Think of it, the main thing this brings back into the game is FATIGUE!!!!!!

If you look at AFL in its modern context, the game was at its most attractive post 2000 either side of 2010; when fatigue was not as much of a factor, because there was no interchange cap. This allowed precision sides to perform better, as they were able to run for as long as the athletic sides with greater breaks. Contrast that with now, and this is why teams like Richmond and the Dogs were able to win the flags they won and why Adelaide in 2017 fell apart and why WC cannot truly back up their flag effort last season. Precision play is simply not sustainable when you don't have the players or the players are fatigued more often than not.

However, the concerns that saw the interchange cap being introduced were certainly valid, and unless watchers want to see more high impact concussions again either the measure needs to be retained or something else to combat concussion is needed.

I've more to say on this, but I'll save it for when we get to the appropriate section.

Fatigue is needed for a number or reasons:
1. The game opens up. When players are tired they cannot get to every contest and will be forced to revert back to traditional positions.

... aaand we're there!

This has been demonstrated to be what the AFL intended when they brought in the interchange cap, but what it resulted in was a rise in stoppages and congestion, because as we all know when people do not want to run they don't. What's easier when you're tired, hanging off the play and letting your opposition get an easy clearance which you now have to chase or clogging up a stoppage with 14 plus players with a small static zone denying your opposition the corridor to ensure their only option is either long down the line or another throwin?

It's a theory that sounds good, but ultimately is utterly exploitable by AFL coaches who are determined to exploit rule changes to get ahead.

2. Reduces collision impact by way of reducing top speed, reducing average speed and reducing repeat top speed efforts. I feel this will drastically reduce the amount of collision injuries and concussion.

Like I said, this has been relatively proven. Nothing to argue with here.

3. This will see the return of the more traditional footballer rather than just the running athlete. I don’t care who you are, how fast you can run and how far you can run, when stuck on the ground the whole time you will get tired. Look at the players tonight after the game, half of them don’t even look tired. They get too much rest.

Will it?

Wouldn't it make far more sense on the part of AFL recruiters to simply select players who can run all day with minimum rest? Especially with the onus being on tackling at the moment instead of getting and distributing the ball.

I'd think what you'd find is that the trends would be away from footballers and into athletes who can outperform their contemporaries over a 2-3 hour timeframe, because that is the direction the game went in the past when we transitioned from simply picking footballers into drafting sciences initially.

4. My favourite - reduce the number of umpires needed on the field. The reason the afl have up’d the number of umpires is that they want to make sure they can see every contest and judge what they see. They can’t call correctly if they are too far away. Hence increase the number of umpires on the field. I was at the game Saturday night and I counted 7 umpires on the field at the centre bounce. 3 in the square with one bouncing on diagonal and then one on each point of the square. It’s insane!!! How on earth can you ever have consistency in umpiring with 7 different people calling the game. I know they are all inbred animals and we can’t stand them but even they must have difference in opinion on what is what.

I'm aware that you clarified this somewhat later - as a joke, even if it's in poor taste - so I'll leave the notion that they're 'inbred animals' to one side.

Do you want a game that is fair or not?

Reducing the amount of umpires on the field would increase the amount of free kicks that go unseen and therefore go unpaid. Backman will return to belting forwards in the back of the head wherever they can get away with it. Elbows and knees getting driven in wherever possible. And that's just the thuggishness.

If you think we have two separate rulesets for the good players and the good ordinary citizens, imagine how much worse it'd be in the event that you have one umpire who must run the length of the field to be next to the play. He's around the 'good' all the time, they're the captains and the ones who interact wit him/her all the time; he knows them, sees them every time they throw the ball up, every time they adjudicate a free through the middle of the ground. You cannot on one hand say that 'consistency is what every fan wants' then on the other hand argue for less umpires which would see nothing more than less consistency. They would be fatigued, they would miss more of the play, and they would make more mistakes; anything you gain in consistent application of the rules (hopefully, via having a single set of interpretations; I'm dubious of that, as we've seen interpretations change because the game's close and it's the last five minutes) is lost via distance from an unexpected play, the limited field of view that is generated from having a single set of eyes surveying a footy field, and through fatigue.

If consistency is what you wanted, you'd be advocating something completely different; a move to include more video umpiring, a move to allow boundary umpires to pay certain frees around a throw in, more umpires in a stoppage situation, a well known procedure for outside of area adjudication (because you're not wrong about downfield umps lacking the subtlety that comes from viewing the play from the appropriate angle up close) not for less umpiring. What you plainly want is a return to the 'good old days', in which footy was supposedly better; they had one ump then, why not trial that now? The difference between now and then is the amount of poor behaviour that went on during a game that was acceptable and isn't now, and the sheer amount of money involved. The AFL is a multimillion dollar sporting entertainment enterprise; there are real consequences if there are doubts over the validity of results due to umpiring issues, which is why we're having this discussion in the first place.

If your solution makes things worse or introduces new problems that reflect the current status quo, we're almost better off sticking with the current system in which the errors which we already have are known and we can seek measures to fix them instead of exchanging them for new ones.

I know it’s probably been said but it needs to be said again... the only thing that is majorly different in the game now and what it had been for 100 years is the number of times the player come off for a rest...





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And the amount of bullshit that players used to do off the ball...
And the amount of footy being played...
And the amount of coaching each player that plays AFL gets and receives...
And the amount of time and effort that goes into discovering ways to get as close to cheating as possible without doing so...
And the amount of scrutiny over each and every single thing going on out there...
And the amount of money that is involved in the game...

Exactly the same.

All of that constitutes a major difference in how the game is player and how it is adjudicated. You cannot romanticise the past to the extent that you refuse to acknowledge how things simply cannot be as they were again. People, the times, and yes the game of AFL; all of it has changed and cannot go back to the way things were. If things like this were simple to fix, it'd have been done.

There's more at stake now, with more careers hanging in the balance, and there is more effort going into undermining the role of umpiring - from both sides of the fence - than ever before.

And I come back to the poor joke you made above.

By making such a joke - as this is not the first time you've commented in such a way on umpiring - you are forming part of the problem. Australians hate authority, they detest being told what to do, and they object vociferously whenever they are put out 'unfairly', whether it was or not. This comes out in our attitude to police, and it comes out in our attitude to umpires.

Tell me, have you ever considered what being an umpire is like? Have you ever thought about how it must feel to be reviled once or twice a week for 3 hours at a time? To have people accuse you of precisely what you've said above without an ounce of irony? To have people spit at you?

My brother was an umpire, for about 4 years. He was a reasonable one, who left because of politics within his particular fraternity of umpires; he was pretty no nonsense, and he'd played the game for about 6 years and umpired the levels he knew about. My father used to take him to games; he stopped, because he could no longer take listening to arseholes describing his son in the manner people do. He couldn't take it any more.

While there are issues to do with umpiring at AFL level, there are bigger issues with fans of the game that exacerbate them. There isn't much of your post I agree with, beyond the notion that the current status quo needs to be looked at, but hopefully this has been done in a respectful way this time around.

 

[Pater44]

Have I ever wondered what it is like to be an umpire? Actually I have been one when I was younger for a number of years. Different sport being basketball, but very much had the approach of what is needed and what was respected by the players. And being a player who played at a very high level I was mindful of what I respected in an umpire/referee and brought it when I was one.
- Never once did I try and influence the game.
- I would always make sure I was in the best position to make the call.
- if I couldn’t see and made the wrong call because I couldn’t see I apologised.
- The players are the reason I had a job and I wanted the game to be the best spectacle it could be.
- I didn’t want to be noticed. If a player was over stepping the line I would talk to them, not arrogantly but as I would anyone.
- Too many umpires feel like because they have a whistle they should be listened to. Wrong... you are there to mediate not be part of the game.
- Players respected me because I had an honest , truthful and fair explanation of calls if needed.

What people hate and me personally is that umpires are noticed. They should not be celebrities, no one should know their name. And if people do then it’s because people feel they are a great umpire. Too many times no one can understand what they are calling. But a lot can easily be defended if they explain from my view this is what I saw. But they never do and arrogance by the umpires and AFL shines through.



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[Gethelred]

Have I ever wondered what it is like to be an umpire? Actually I have been one when I was younger for a number of years. Different sport being basketball, but very much had the approach of what is needed and what was respected by the players. And being a player who played at a very high level I was mindful of what I respected in an umpire/referee and brought it when I was one.
- Never once did I try and influence the game.
- I would always make sure I was in the best position to make the call.
- if I couldn’t see and made the wrong call because I couldn’t see I apologised.
- The players are the reason I had a job and I wanted the game to be the best spectacle it could be.
- I didn’t want to be noticed. If a player was over stepping the line I would talk to them, not arrogantly but as I would anyone.
- Too many umpires feel like because they have a whistle they should be listened to. Wrong... you are there to mediate not be part of the game.
- Players respected me because I had an honest , truthful and fair explanation of calls if needed.

What people hate and me personally is that umpires are noticed. They should not be celebrities, no one should know their name. And if people do then it’s because people feel they are a great umpire. Too many times no one can understand what they are calling. But a lot can easily be defended if they explain from my view this is what I saw. But they never do and arrogance by the umpires and AFL shines through.



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I'm struggling a little here, Pater.

See, on one hand (if you've been an umpire) you are well aware of exactly how quickly a crowd can turn against you, even in a sport so replete with arbitration as basketball is. There's also a significant cultural difference between basketball and footy, which is borne out in how both sports treat their umpires; Americans respect the establishment and the rules, where Australians do not. There's also a difference in clarity and the consistency of rules; you'd know them better than me, how many of basketball's rules are capable of being interpreted in different ways by different people? How many of them require there to be an aspect of intent to be adjudicated?

On the other, your attitude to AFL umpires is rather consistent with the public at large's, and it is appalling. There are aspects of it that I do agree with, but it's like you took what I think and flipped the reasons for it on its head to make it repellent.

I agree with you that people shouldn't know an umpire's name, and that they should not be noticed, but it isn't to prevent them from being celebrities. If an umpire is known, the spotlight is on them, and the pressure on them increases; umpires should be uniform, ubiquitous, and held to a loftier standard. There is a reason for a police uniform, for example; an umpire is a custodian of the game, and in that place one umpire should be much the same as another. The players being the point is also something I kind of agree with, but it isn't the players it is the game that is the reason umpires exist. At the moment, there is no reason for an umpire to take pride in their work, no incentive beyond the monetary; if 'the players are the reason [you] have a job', why would you become an umpire? Why not simply be a player?

Beyond that, your list is almost redundant. Of course you want to be in the best position to make the call. Of course if you got it wrong you can and you should apologise and neutralise the situation, and of course you should speak to them in a polite way. However, I point blank object to your first point, as I rather do not think an AFL umpire - or, indeed, an umpire at any level of the game; if they are, they will not be an umpire for long - would try to influence the result of a game, and that you think they do is an example of what I mean when I object to the public viewpoint on umpiring. This also goes for your opinion as to their arrogance; they address the players the way they are taught to address the players, and they need to be heard. Not all people have big booming voices when raised, and to be heard when there are 90000 people at the G, you need to raise your voice.

I think you're being more than a little unfair, and you're doing what plenty of other people do and reading things into their behaviour that simply aren't there. It's encouraged by our shared cultural bias against those in a position of power over us, and it is completely natural, even inbuilt. However, it needs to change, for several reasons; one, being that there are chronic shortages of people who want to be umpires despite there being record numbers of games being played; two, that there is no incentive beyond a paycheck to make people want to become an umpire; three, those that are umpires are driven away from it because they're treated like scum; four, that all of this feeds into there being an ever shrinking pool of people of a) an appropriate level of fitness, and b) an appropriate level of experience/skill to umpire at AFL level. Less umpires means less quality umpiring, across the board.

 

[thylacine60]

thread nominated in relevance hof.......

 

[blue healer]

Jeezus I just read all all of Gethelred's last 2 posts and feel like I just read Tolstoy.

Few times I thought I might respond to some points and then forgot them.

The only point I will make is that I think the game was at it's best, as a spectacle, in the 80's and early 90's. Come at me you young whippersnippers.

Unfortunately I find myself turning off before half time in most games these days that don't involve Carlton, such is my disappointment with todays game, and I must candidly admit that umpiring inconsistency is a contributor to this.

Sorry mate. I really like your post content and thought processes but these two were hard reads.

 

[thylacine60]

once the genie is out of the bottle - it don't go back - as an example - it has been mentioned that the score review was only introduced to avoid "the howlers" unfortunately that can never be the case as every miniscule "did it or didn't it?" incident is now put under the microscope - it can't be any other way

 

[Blue and Blue]

Jeezus I just read all all of Gethelred's last 2 posts and feel like I just read Tolstoy.

Few times I thought I might respond to some points and then forgot them.

The only point I will make is that I think the game was at it's best, as a spectacle, in the 80's and early 90's. Come at me you young whippersnippers.

Unfortunately I find myself turning off before half time in most games these days that don't involve Carlton, such is my disappointment with todays game, and I must candidly admit that umpiring inconsistency is a contributor to this.

Sorry mate. I really like your post content and thought processes but these two were hard reads.

Agree whole heartedly. And that was before I needed spectacles coincidentally.

Of course it wouldnt be right in this thread not to mention that the umpires all need glasses, as we used to yell over the boundary fence way back when the world was a bit less nasty.....

You folks can write as much speculative philosophical stuff as you like but it wont change anythink. The umps will do the job...get it right, get it wrong, annoy some or all always, and good on them for doing the thankless task.

 

[Stig O'Hara]

Read today these poor video guys are on $250 a game, with minimal training.....and on a hiding to nothing.

Would rather be a blue coat, free uniform, parking spot, above award per hour, free lunch and you finish at 3 qt.

Maybe the late one gets the short straw.

 

[blue healer]

once the genie is out of the bottle - it don't go back - as an example - it has been mentioned that the score review was only introduced to avoid "the howlers" unfortunately that can never be the case as every miniscule "did it or didn't it?" incident is now put under the microscope - it can't be any other way

Understand that but it doesn't make me like it any more.

 

[blue healer]

Agree whole heartedly. And that was before I needed spectacles coincidentally.

Of course it wouldnt be right in this thread not to mention that the umpires all need glasses, as we used to yell over the boundary fence way back when the world was a bit less nasty.....

You folks can write as much speculative philosophical stuff as you like but it wont change anythink. The umps will do the job...get ir right, get it wrong, annoy some or all always and good on them for doing the thankless task.

And some reckon dinosaurs are extinct. I wanna be T Rex.

 

[blue healer]

Having said all that earlier derogatory stuff about the modern game I have just agreed to attend the Swans/GCS game today just to keep my Brother in Law company.

Think I might spend most of the day trying to analyse the umpiring, not expecting a great deal of fight from GCS.

 

[Gethelred]

Jeezus I just read all all of Gethelred's last 2 posts and feel like I just read Tolstoy.

Few times I thought I might respond to some points and then forgot them.

The only point I will make is that I think the game was at it's best, as a spectacle, in the 80's and early 90's. Come at me you young whippersnippers.

Unfortunately I find myself turning off before half time in most games these days that don't involve Carlton, such is my disappointment with todays game, and I must candidly admit that umpiring inconsistency is a contributor to this.

Sorry mate. I really like your post content and thought processes but these two were hard reads.

Don't remember footy before 2000, it was only after I started playing myself that it held my interest, but having said that to my mind the best years for footy after that were 2009, 2010, and 2011. At the time, the comp was trying to replicate Geelong's attacking flair, and so most teams played attacking footy.

If you find yourself disappointed at the game these days, you really aren't alone. Over coached sides wrestling each other until one side either wins a free or mongrels the ball forward to a 2 on one a forward is expected to halve.

However - and this'll be contentious - how much of your (and my) pessimism/disappointment is drawn not from the games themselves but our fatigue with everything AFL? We're inundated, beset from all sides; what does Wilson, Niall, Murphy think? Did you hear what Newman, Barrett, Cornes said about us? You heard how Champion data said, how Supercoach rated, etc.

Then, you get the club stuff, which you're supposed to love. Heard about how SPS didn't learn to speak english until later on in life? Puff pieces and podcasts, featuring interviews and alsorted inanity.

It makes me tired. And I don't even do half of it.

All of it, to hype up the game on the weekend. No wonder it rarely lives up to the hype around it.

 

[blue healer]

Don't remember footy before 2000, it was only after I started playing myself that it held my interest, but having said that to my mind the best years for footy after that were 2009, 2010, and 2011. At the time, the comp was trying to replicate Geelong's attacking flair, and so most teams played attacking footy.

If you find yourself disappointed at the game these days, you really aren't alone. Over coached sides wrestling each other until one side either wins a free or mongrels the ball forward to a 2 on one a forward is expected to halve.

However - and this'll be contentious - how much of your (and my) pessimism/disappointment is drawn not from the games themselves but our fatigue with everything AFL? We're inundated, beset from all sides; what does Wilson, Niall, Murphy think? Did you hear what Newman, Barrett, Cornes said about us? You heard how Champion data said, how Supercoach rated, etc.

Then, you get the club stuff, which you're supposed to love. Heard about how SPS didn't learn to speak english until later on in life? Puff pieces and podcasts, featuring interviews and alsorted inanity.

It makes me tired. And I don't even do half of it.

All of it, to hype up the game on the weekend. No wonder it rarely lives up to the hype around it.

Being in Sydney I miss most of that white noise. Got very tired with the Fox Footy shows a number of years ago and now rely on this forum for info and a laugh.

 

[Metalcrusher]

AFL fans do not want consistency, they merely say that's what they want. What they want is more frees for their team, nothing more and nothing less; less frees overall, but more frees for them.

Whether that'd be good for the game, though, is entirely another thing.


If you look at AFL in its modern context, the game was at its most attractive post 2000 either side of 2010; when fatigue was not as much of a factor, because there was no interchange cap. This allowed precision sides to perform better, as they were able to run for as long as the athletic sides with greater breaks. Contrast that with now, and this is why teams like Richmond and the Dogs were able to win the flags they won and why Adelaide in 2017 fell apart and why WC cannot truly back up their flag effort last season. Precision play is simply not sustainable when you don't have the players or the players are fatigued more often than not.

However, the concerns that saw the interchange cap being introduced were certainly valid, and unless watchers want to see more high impact concussions again either the measure needs to be retained or something else to combat concussion is needed.

I've more to say on this, but I'll save it for when we get to the appropriate section.


... aaand we're there!

This has been demonstrated to be what the AFL intended when they brought in the interchange cap, but what it resulted in was a rise in stoppages and congestion, because as we all know when people do not want to run they don't. What's easier when you're tired, hanging off the play and letting your opposition get an easy clearance which you now have to chase or clogging up a stoppage with 14 plus players with a small static zone denying your opposition the corridor to ensure their only option is either long down the line or another throwin?

It's a theory that sounds good, but ultimately is utterly exploitable by AFL coaches who are determined to exploit rule changes to get ahead.

Like I said, this has been relatively proven. Nothing to argue with here.
Will it?

Wouldn't it make far more sense on the part of AFL recruiters to simply select players who can run all day with minimum rest? Especially with the onus being on tackling at the moment instead of getting and distributing the ball.

I'd think what you'd find is that the trends would be away from footballers and into athletes who can outperform their contemporaries over a 2-3 hour timeframe, because that is the direction the game went in the past when we transitioned from simply picking footballers into drafting sciences initially.

I'm aware that you clarified this somewhat later - as a joke, even if it's in poor taste - so I'll leave the notion that they're 'inbred animals' to one side.

Do you want a game that is fair or not?

Reducing the amount of umpires on the field would increase the amount of free kicks that go unseen and therefore go unpaid. Backman will return to belting forwards in the back of the head wherever they can get away with it. Elbows and knees getting driven in wherever possible. And that's just the thuggishness.

If you think we have two separate rulesets for the good players and the good ordinary citizens, imagine how much worse it'd be in the event that you have one umpire who must run the length of the field to be next to the play. He's around the 'good' all the time, they're the captains and the ones who interact wit him/her all the time; he knows them, sees them every time they throw the ball up, every time they adjudicate a free through the middle of the ground. You cannot on one hand say that 'consistency is what every fan wants' then on the other hand argue for less umpires which would see nothing more than less consistency. They would be fatigued, they would miss more of the play, and they would make more mistakes; anything you gain in consistent application of the rules (hopefully, via having a single set of interpretations; I'm dubious of that, as we've seen interpretations change because the game's close and it's the last five minutes) is lost via distance from an unexpected play, the limited field of view that is generated from having a single set of eyes surveying a footy field, and through fatigue.

If consistency is what you wanted, you'd be advocating something completely different; a move to include more video umpiring, a move to allow boundary umpires to pay certain frees around a throw in, more umpires in a stoppage situation, a well known procedure for outside of area adjudication (because you're not wrong about downfield umps lacking the subtlety that comes from viewing the play from the appropriate angle up close) not for less umpiring. What you plainly want is a return to the 'good old days', in which footy was supposedly better; they had one ump then, why not trial that now? The difference between now and then is the amount of poor behaviour that went on during a game that was acceptable and isn't now, and the sheer amount of money involved. The AFL is a multimillion dollar sporting entertainment enterprise; there are real consequences if there are doubts over the validity of results due to umpiring issues, which is why we're having this discussion in the first place.

If your solution makes things worse or introduces new problems that reflect the current status quo, we're almost better off sticking with the current system in which the errors which we already have are known and we can seek measures to fix them instead of exchanging them for new ones.


And the amount of ******** that players used to do off the ball...
And the amount of footy being played...
And the amount of coaching each player that plays AFL gets and receives...
And the amount of time and effort that goes into discovering ways to get as close to cheating as possible without doing so...
And the amount of scrutiny over each and every single thing going on out there...
And the amount of money that is involved in the game...

Exactly the same.

All of that constitutes a major difference in how the game is player and how it is adjudicated. You cannot romanticise the past to the extent that you refuse to acknowledge how things simply cannot be as they were again. People, the times, and yes the game of AFL; all of it has changed and cannot go back to the way things were. If things like this were simple to fix, it'd have been done.

There's more at stake now, with more careers hanging in the balance, and there is more effort going into undermining the role of umpiring - from both sides of the fence - than ever before.

And I come back to the poor joke you made above.

By making such a joke - as this is not the first time you've commented in such a way on umpiring - you are forming part of the problem. Australians hate authority, they detest being told what to do, and they object vociferously whenever they are put out 'unfairly', whether it was or not. This comes out in our attitude to police, and it comes out in our attitude to umpires.

Tell me, have you ever considered what being an umpire is like? Have you ever thought about how it must feel to be reviled once or twice a week for 3 hours at a time? To have people accuse you of precisely what you've said above without an ounce of irony? To have people spit at you?

My brother was an umpire, for about 4 years. He was a reasonable one, who left because of politics within his particular fraternity of umpires; he was pretty no nonsense, and he'd played the game for about 6 years and umpired the levels he knew about. My father used to take him to games; he stopped, because he could no longer take listening to arseholes describing his son in the manner people do. He couldn't take it any more.

While there are issues to do with umpiring at AFL level, there are bigger issues with fans of the game that exacerbate them. There isn't much of your post I agree with, beyond the notion that the current status quo needs to be looked at, but hopefully this has been done in a respectful way this time around.

TL;DR..

POTY though .... campaigner.

Edit: Maybe the AFL needs to get with their own profile and start recruiting umpiring athletic beasts?

 

[Beast__Mode]

Hocking now saying Kennedy didn’t touch the ball dedpite Kennedy immediately reacting during the moment in the game, and clear vision of his finger bending back.

[Insert picture of Iraqi Information Minister here]

I’m happy to have a debate on whether there should be a review system, but while it’s woth us the AFL has an obligation to maximise accuracy within it. The current situation is embarrassing.

 

[Aphrodite]

Hocking now saying Kennedy didn’t touch the ball dedpite Kennedy immediately reacting during the moment in the game, and clear vision of his finger bending back.

[Insert picture of Iraqi Information Minister here]

I’m happy to have a debate on whether there should be a review system, but while it’s woth us the AFL has an obligation to maximise accuracy within it. The current situation is embarrassing.

 

[Beast__Mode]

Aph = Mod of the year!!

 

[Metalcrusher]

Aph = Mod of the year!!

Suck Hole ….. she BANNED me .. right in front of me … RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME.

 

[thylacine60]

Understand that but it doesn't make me like it any more.

you'll like it.........and like it..........