Blatant cheating by umpires - “having a ‘mare tonight” (Part 1)

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They did go on strike in 1981. Second tier umpires filled in - one of whom was Brad Beitzel son of the famous ex-umpire Harry Beitzel.

Here is a maggot trying to be objective but his own innate subconscious emotional response wouldn’t let him put his whistle in his mouth and pay The Langford a free, despite being in full sight of this one. If you look closely you can almost see the confirmation bias.

image

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Just prior to the 19th VFL round in 1981 32 League umpires resigned in disgust at their treatment by VFL authorities. Come the Saturday Reserve Grade umpires were brought in resulting in even worse decisions than usual. A week later the dispute was settled and the umpiring vaguely improved.
Relations between the VFL and the Umpires’ Association has varied at times from the harmonious to the acrimonious, the low point being the one round ‘strike’ in 1981 that saw all senior field umpires resign on the Friday prior to a round of Saturday fixtures. The resolutions of this action led to a period of almost twenty years of good relations.

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There’s no such assumption. It’s looking at trends, outliers, standard deviation etc, not individual games. I’m trying to remain objective, but it does look pretty odd.

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So for this one, i was on the boundary near the 50 ARC, it was clear as day he was being held.

I lost a lot of good chips in this passage of play my friends.

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Well there you go, round 19 in 1981.

I was at that game at Windy Hill vs Demons, never cared much for umpires so didn’t notice who was the maggot on the field.

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There was another stunningly bad case of “horizontal gravity” affecting our jumper vs Collingwood.

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Yeah…something happened…don’t remember what it was…but I think Harry Beitzel’s son might have made his debut as a scab.

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I would hate to see our game come to the point of having to really escort the maggots off the field under tight security. Not saying i personally would jump the fence, however i am sure that if we keep going down by 15 frees a game someone will.

Yup, I just presented the data, there is no assumptions or manipulations at all.

Everything happens for a reason - whether its bias, directive, our game style or what, those trends aren’t noise.

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and on a pike

OK Mr Bix. We all pretty well agree that the even up frees come in the last qtr. Can you do the graphs but only until 3QTR time??

When you are done with that, i have a few pivot tables for work i need knocked up.

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I love watching old games of footy where the commentators like Lou Richards call the game as it is. If the umpiring was bad they would say so and where aloud to say so.

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What I know for fact is that Finnis met the players prior to that Hawthorn game and they were told they wouldn’t be participating in the finals. IIRC, that was in July, the AFL didn’t hand down their “findings” until mid August(?). We played like a defeated team that night and it was because they players had the wind taken from their sails by the AFLPA, ironically a body that was supposed to support them. From memory, that was the night of the infamous Evans hug in the rooms and subsequent standing down from the chairmanship. ‘‘Twas a big few days.

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Those dates are very much in Jackson Taylor’s sights

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One assumption I would make is that players are similarly trained and coached across all teams in regard to how to avoid penalties and attract frees. There are differences in individual playing style and team style (speculation on EFC circa 2000 being relatively aggressive is interesting), but I expect some or much of that to be negated by list changes (including player migrations) and changes to coaching, game plan etc (such as we have seen). In other words, I find it difficult to accept that EFC makes significantly more errors on average in attracting/conceding frees (and 50s) than most other teams, given a large sample of games.

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I easily could, but I haven’t found a good place to get the data on a quarter by quarter basis?

No worries about the pivots, send them through

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I cannot remember the year " late 50’s" but i was outside the umpires rooms at windy hill after a game and the crowd COUNTED OUT the umpire. Was pretty firey all sorts of words I hadn’t heard before. Counted from ten down to one then all called ‘YOUR OUT’
I was there with a mate also a bomber .
My family were at Punt road ,still are.

A lot about the umpiring …