DB - agree completely with the umpire thing, although not sure if the problem stems from Geishen or higher up (rules committee? commission?)
My thought for a couple of years has been that this whole issue stems back to television. Decisions have always been contentious, the interpretations grey, and many decisions wrong. The difference now is that every decision is replayed over and over, so that every time something is got wrong, the whole football world knows about it. In the past, it happened, no (or minimal) replays, and so we just forgot about it, and got on with it. Even the Harmes knock in the 79 GF has only ever been shown from one angle...imagine if there were 4 different angles? History would be different, one way or the other.
What seems to have happened is that because of this, because wrong decisions have been highlighted over and over, the AFL has tried to reduce the number of incorrect decisions. And the only way to do this is to try and turn grey decision making into, as you so rightly say, black and white. Hence, hands in the back, over the shoulder...all incidental contacts.
Never before have we had contact rules / interpretations that had nothing to do with either safety of a player, or unfairly inhibiting a player's ability to go for the ball. Now, we have. It flies completely in the face of everything our game stands for, and all so that we can try and make rules more black and white, so umpires don't get shown up. And what it has actually done is make the umpires mistakes more glaring and, in many cases, infuriating (ie umpire misses a blatant shove in the back during a marking contest down one end, and then pays an incidental finger nail in the back down the other end).
The AFL should smply say that the rules are grey, interpretations are grey, we are going to try and get consistency in interpretation, and that umpires will, and always will, make mistakes, and we just need to acccept that.
And get rid of penalising incidental contact!
_________________ Mens sana in corpore sano.
Bring back the laurel wreath logo!!!
|