Its ■■■■■■ good stress relief having a vent at the umps when they have done a shocking job.
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A Richmond supporter got banned for 3 weeks for calling an umpire a “green maggot”. He didn’t swear. So what out of those 2 words can be considered offensive or threatening? Green? The colour of the uniform? Or maggot? We’ve been calling them maggots since as long as I can remember. That’s not worthy of being banned from a game. As I said, violence and abuse on racial, religious or sexual grounds, yeah boot them out. But that and “bald headed flog”, what are we coming to? To be honest my interest in football is waning. My love of Essendon will never dissipate, I go to games as I have since first becoming a member 23 years ago and cheer the boys on as usual, but the actual watching of neutral games is not all that entertaining to me anymore. The way the game is being played, and the way the game is being run, is easily the worst in my lifetime. We can only blame the AFL for that. Treat the paying customers, those who click through the turnstiles, those that you fleece every week and try and wring every last dollar out of, like criminals for just barracking and the game is dead.
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Carlton fans are grubs
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I can understand the AFL wanting to make the game more attractive for families. But, I reckon that crowds are generally fine now. There is no need for the AFL to play up anti-social behaviour & go after it. They are creating something out of nothing.
I flew out last year & took my son to his first game of footy. We had a brilliant night. I remember looking around and thinking “Gee, this is nothing like the 70s/80s when I was a kid”. Windy Hill, Moorabbin, Vic Park…those places were downright frightening at times. Punch drunk lunatics everywhere. And hard to breathe from all the cigarette smoke. I witnessed plenty of violence in the terraces & outside grounds.
It’s nothing like that now. But, the AFL are treating it like it is. Footy has always been a game followed by passionate & vocal fans. If the AFL are hell bent on sterilising it into oblivion, traditional footy fans will either walk or agitate for the current administrations removal.
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Being heavy handed with mobs is asking for trouble.
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But the thing is…there are no mobs
Totally agree. I’m all for offending a group of people that hold power over others… and abuse that power.
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On Friday night near us there was a group of men and women looking for trouble and they were trying to get security to bite. Start of a mob, and AFL are the cause, perhaps.
I wasn’t around then, but of course, I think it’s good you can’t smoke in the stands, and if people are going to brawl they should absolutely be kicked out. Those two things can potentially have a physical impact on other people.
The AFL goes on about how ‘progressive’ the game has become. I don’t think it’s ever been more sanitised and sterile. It’s so corporate now, there is no more room in the game for personality.
I find it so boring now. I watch the games on TV and purchase memberships, but don’t have the same desire to do much more.
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And this year, the umpiring against EFC and somewhat in general, combined with made up drama of their own creating like this is making it even more super easy to move on to the next channel. Have to assume they think this is what will appeal to the next gen, makin it into a ‘reality show’ rather than a sport, not even corporate really.
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There is still atmosphere at games, but it is under threat now like never before.
The Age reckons the AFL has taken the game away from fans by stealth. For Essendon fans, the AFL took the game away from us with a sledgehammer during the saga.
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Fat Pr*ck, Vlad & Gil Jong Un - the cabal. 2/3 are gone. One more to go, plus all their sycophantic cronies.
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This whole saga encapsulates the general incompetence of the AFL and how it ‘solves’ so called ‘problems’.
Here, the ‘problem’ is with fan behaviour - the fact that there are occasionally fights at games. It’s probably not a big problem, cause it doesn’t happen very often. However they’ve decided they want to solve it anyway (probably for a financial reason like sponsorship, I assume).
And of course, there is a quick, easy, and effective solution to that ‘problem’ if they wanted to actually solve it. And that is to ban (or heavily restrict) alcohol sales at games. That would literally immediately solve the problem. But if of course the AFL officials won’t do that, because they’d lose too much money and sponsorships and bonuses, wouldn’t they? And we can’t have that.
So instead of using the obvious solution to solve the small ‘problem’, they instead invent another solution. Which, like all their solutions to all their small problems is a) completely over the top, b) p/sses everyone off, thereby creating a worse problem, and c) completely ineffective (there was a fight last night despite the overbearing presence of the AFL Gestapo).
So in summary:
- Small problem
- Obvious solution ignored
- Over the top, ineffective solution implemented
- Worse problem created
The whole thing is literally peak AFL
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I think the actual problem is the standard of umpiring and lack of quality umpires. This is the AFails actual problem BUT they can’t/won’t address this issue as it actually involves work for them in simplifying the rules for the Umps and taking a lot of the grey areas out including creating a bunker for score reviews. It’s the inconsistency that drives everyone nuts and creates far greater crowd control issues.
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Article by Michael Gleeson in the rage, spot on about fan turn off caused by AFL
Football is the game of the people. It provides the lingua franca of the country. To understand this country, you have to understand this game. Or you did.
Football fans have lost the sense that the game is theirs. They feel that by stealth, the game has been taken away from them.
Security patrols the aisles at Marvel Stadium on Saturday night.
Security patrols the aisles at Marvel Stadium on Saturday night.CREDIT:AAP
The stadiums went first. They lost their suburban home grounds, and with them, a piece of each club’s identity. Economic rationalism demanded ground rationalisation and the rationalists won. Football lost.
The game went next – it didn’t look any more like the game the fans first fell in love with. The administrators were blamed, but it was not their fault. It was the fault of the full-time professionalism of players and coaches.
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So the administrators changed the rules, to try to chase the game back to where it once was. That was their intent, but that was not how it felt to fans. It felt like those governing the game could not keep their hands off it.
The changes were too many and too often. Who could be sure how a rule would be decided one week to the next, let alone year on year? Players, coaches and umpires were not sure. The fan had little hope.
They fashioned a game in which two umpires could look at the same incident and make two opposite decisions. It was the cunning brilliance of the rules: you could never be wrong.
Last week a player, Jeremy Howe, jumped on another player, Tom McDonald’s back, to take a mark. Howe was penalised for having his studs up when he took the “mark”.
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He paid the price for a rule change brought in to solve a different problem - the Toby Greene rule. The opponent’s back was no longer collateral damage to the mark; the spectacular mark was collateral damage to one rare bit of play.
Of course that decision was deemed correct by the AFL because an umpire was within his rights to interpret the rules that way. To protect that decision, they then ruled all other similar incidents would be ruled that way this year.
And the fans again felt the game was being taken away from them. Now the authorities seemed to want to take away the high mark.
Yet still to the ground they went, because this was their place of escape and hope. But when they got there they were now being met by people in hi-vis jackets telling them that they way they barracked was changing, too. Fans were now being told not how they couldn’t barrack, but seemingly how they could.
The hi-vis staff eyeballed fans suspiciously as they prowled the aisles, waiting for a misspoken word.
The jacketed staff were doing exactly what the AFL had assured us the day before they were not doing: they were cracking down on fan behavior.
It might not be the AFL’s instruction to crack down on behavior. It could be a police decision or it could be the security company hired to police the crowds. (The major event legislation that covers matches means the AFL pays the bill but does not control how the crowd is policed.) But it was a crackdown.
A Carlton fan wears tape over her mouth to protest against the AFL’s crowd behaviour measures.
A Carlton fan wears tape over her mouth to protest against the AFL’s crowd behaviour measures.CREDIT:CHANNEL SEVEN
So no one believed the AFL when they said there was no crackdown, because they could see with their own eyes there was one.
On Sunday, the Marvel Stadium chief executive admitted they had increased security patrols of the aisles in recent weeks. Fans knew that, but the AFL looked like they didn’t, or else they would have pointed to them. Did the AFL have no discussion with their stadia even if they had no legal right to tell them how to police their crowds?
The AFL had a story to tell on crowd behavior, but they didn’t tell it.
They are now presented as the organisation that encourages marketing experiments with the game (think AFLX) and urges clubs to work on the “match-day experience”, but when it comes to an understanding of their fans they are ignorant.
The football fan has been allowed now to feel uncertain if they are welcome at the game: What can I do? Will they kick me out if I object to the way that umpire decided that bit of play?
The fans’ sense of the game being taken away from them is acute. And they resent it.
Fans are thus now better prepared to accept the word of the thrown-out loudmouth when they protest (very quickly on social media replete with videos of the incident and just as quickly on talkback radio) that they did nothing, than they are to accept the assurances of the officials that the person deserved to be thrown out.
The loud and ejected have been allowed to be turned into the victims because the AFL has allowed itself to be cast as the aloof bureaucracy trying to take the game away from the people.
If you are going to do it, be honest and tell people why. People want to be condescended to by officials about as much as they want to sit near an offensive supporter behaving badly.strong text
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**Perhaps a few banners in the crowd. WE PAY YOUR SALARY. **
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Well if you go to the footy to abuse the opposition or the umpires, I have to question whether you have the right priorities - Is there anything wrong with supporting/applauding/encouraging/cheering on your team.
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disagree to a point.
The AFL is trying convince the public that the ‘problem is fan behaviour’.
The underlying problem is umpiring and the rules changes. The umpiring has been pathetic this whole season. It’s a combination of the umpires, the umpiring department inability to admit wrong decisions, and the AFL who keep changing the rules with new gimmicks to sell ratings.
The supporters of every club has had enough, and they are getting vocal about it. The media are getting vocal about it.
There was reports after the Anzac Day game that the Umpiring department was furious that the AFL wasn’t defending them.
In typical AFL fashion they go over the top and silence people that are exposing and talking out about them.
As a result they go over the top with security, start harassing supporters and kick out Supporters who abuse umpires.
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Yeah.
But where’s the fun in that!
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