well free kicks were 20-11 Norths way. and A couple of Free kicks, were not helpful to us in the slightest.
E.g Baguley free kick after he took the mark as siren sounded. And Im sure there was another one.
The other free kick was to Hurley where he got a free kick after kicked ball, Brown stopped, North player smashed it over boundary and Umpire called advantage.
ALternatively down the other end. Devon smith gave the slightest of bumps to a north player and he takes a dive after he disposes of it. Essendon mark the ball downfield and are about to enter forward 50 again players run forward. Umpire awards free to North Downfield, all North players are now loose and they run forward and have a scoring shot uncontested.
North Actually played like us for the last 2 minutes as free kicks dont help if you need to score fast, so they just kept rolling. Thats were you see free kicks can actually slow you down and make it harder to score as you need to have quick ball movement into the forwardline to get a better contest.
Once a player takes a mark or wins a free kick, any opposition player who is behind the mark is effectively offside and not allowed to tackle or harass (similar to nrl).
Players can then knowingly take a mark and play on quickly knowing that only players ahead of them are able to tackle or harass them. Once the player disposes the ball or plays on ahead of where the mark is, all players are back onside.
Will definitely quicken up the game and also easier to umpire.
If Margetts is indeed âthe fixerâ for our games it doesnât seem like heâll be getting another match umpiring us for a while after the last two efforts.
And seriously Iâm not that fussed so long as theyâre consistent in their interpretation during a game.
Good sides can adapt to consistent calls - itâs when one umpire pays it one way and another pays the opposite that both the players and fans get rightfully peed off.
So in light of the recent angst on here, I did a big afltables scrape and have been sifting through the umpire and free kick data. There is a lot to sift through, I should probably write a blog or something as its quite interesting. In answer to the anti-essendon brigade, I have included a table of games since 2010 where Essendon was the away team. I only included umpires with more than 3 games as not to include anomalies. What I did was show the free kick differential (âHomeTeamFKDiffâ) for the home team (not essendon) in that game, relative to the umpires career differential for the home team. The column on the right is the ratio, so a high positive ratio means that that umpire is involved in games where the number of free kicks to the home team is higher than their career average. Obviously I am aware of the issues with this, but just as a quick discussion point:
Just a quick explanation of how to read this - In games when Matthew Nicholls has umpired, the HT has on average had 0.55 more free kicks than the away team. In games where essendon is the away team, this number is 2.8, with a ratio of 5.12x higher.
1: Get around Andrew Stephens, in away games he is umpiring somehow Essendon wins the free kick differential (on average league wide, the home team gets 1.5 more free kicks than the away team).
2. Not surprisingly, Matthew Nicholls and Troy Panell are 2 of the top 3. I get the feeling that they often umpire together? I will check. Never heard of Shaun Ryan.
3. Any umpires around 1 have no bias, thanks Razor ray.
I have all the data since 2000 including venues obviously so if anyone would like anything in particular looked at⌠say the word.
On Sunday the umpiring was either corrupt or incompetent. The first quarter was especially bad and gave Nth so much momentum. One rule change reversion would be to simply remove the knocked out in the tackle interpretation when a player has prior opportunity.
