I say it all the time.
And, ‘mokka mokka mokka’ when they’re lining up.
And just occasionally, not very often but sometimes, ‘ya knacker’s hanging out!’
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Funny. Quite a fewplayers were booed on the weekend. But it doesn’t matter at all.
None of them were champions of the game.
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Umpiring our sport is never going to be easy. Holding the ball, prior opportunity, did the player duck, was he making enough of an effort … there’s always been a big grey area and always will. The only way we’re going to get better umpiring is to broaden the gene pool, so we need to attract more young people to the profession. Abusing the umpires has the opposite effect.
The poor standard of umpiring is due to our culture of criticising umpires. I’d estimate that footy commentators spend 100 times more effort criticising umpire errors than they spend criticising player errors, and that’s on a “per error” basis. So if you’re a player earning, say, $400k and you fluff a shot at goal you’ll get “he really should have kicked that”. Yet an umpire, earning 1/3 as much who misses a high tackle will have it replayed half a dozen times, will be howled at by the crowd and cop abuse for the rest of the match.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. If you don’t like the standard of umpiring then take look at your own behaviour. Got a son or daughter sitting next to you at the footy? Are your behaviours encouraging them to take up umpiring? Maybe you think someone else’s kids are going to take it up instead. Think again. This problem’s going to get worse before it gets better.
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Me.
This is what it basically comes down to the end.
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The only way to get better umpiring is to fix the rules. I still for the life of me can’t work out how they can differentiate between dropping the ball and the ball spilling free in a tackle. Or deliberate out of bounds and out of bounds because of a mis calculation.
The rules are rubbish.
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It used to be significantly easier before the AFL started to use the rules of the game to engineer the type of product they wanted to sell to their advertisers.
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Back in the day when you’d had one too many Bovrils?
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As they say, the fish rots at the head. Look at Gill. Privileged, private school educated prat whose never had to worry about a dollar in his life, raised in rich South Australian farming stock. That photo of him dressed in that ridiculous mustard coat and the golf cap at the races tells you all you need to know about the bloke. He’s not in touch with the common person, the rank and file footy fan. He watches games behind glass, mingles with celebrities. He sees it as the theatre, and that’s how he wants the crowds to be. He doesn’t care about real footy supporters. He’s after the corporate dollar. The game has lost its way. That has happened well before he became CEO, but it’s gone fast forward under his reign.
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How would you fix the dropping the ball rule? No matter where the rules specify that the line be drawn, the line will always be fuzzy.
As for deliberate out of bounds I wouldn’t mind a “last touch” rule as per soccer except that I’d mandate the free kick to be a drop kick. This would lessen the impact of the rule and bring back a wonderful skill.
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Last touch sucks, we’d have a thousand replays a game trying to figure out every pack out, the boundary umps can not always be right there, just adding more grey.
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If unclear, ball it in. Removes the “intent” problem from the equation.
Bovrils are for Poms. Bonox in my day.
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I’m going with ’ ya mum wears army boots ’ for Toby Greene at the next Marvel game
Will this is get me evicted?
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It’s the below standard umpiring, caused by the AFL trying to get involved, that’s got the fans either walking away or blowing their stack.
So earlier in the year the AFL blamed the umpires, that didn’t work. So they then backed them after RampeGate which was even more ludicrous.
Now they’re blaming the fans for booing and terrible behaviour. Even whilst denying they’ve started cracking down (disputed by the boss of Docklands).
They need to seperate their powers from running the AFL, and running the game of Australian Football.
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Are there still rules in AFL or merely umpire interpretations based on opinion at any given moment?
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Noonan speaks from experience; he was there for the VFLW this week so he saw the C-Bomb playing for us.
Someone really needs to create an incident that becomes a tipping point.
Someone needs to go to the next match with a sign containing a photo of Gil and the word ‘corrupt’ stamped across it and see how long they last. If they were kicked out (which they would be, if it got attention from the broadcaster) then it would be a great story
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I dunno, I think it might be time to let that one go.
True for sporting.
But I can think of a Federal Government which is about as competent…
But we’ll leave that to the politics thread!
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