I would love for us to just come out and rip into the umpiring, but we won’t. The club is so worried about towing the company line that they won’t put up a fight to what clearly is prejudice against the club and it will just continue to happen. Playing nice and keeping quiet certainly hasn’t helped us, so f*ck it and come out swinging.
Regarding the game it was same old, same old. We worked hard, but missed easy shots again to open up a bigger lead and it came back to haunt us. Jake Long is a VFL player and have no clue why we left Dea our for McNeice who did very little. Our midfield looked spent as did Belly and although Brown and McKernan played ok (Jake had a quiet one)…it’s a massive worry that Brown and McKernan are our key forward targets.
Still a slim chance of finals, but Mark Neeld and whatever weird relationship he and Woosha shared screwed our season from the start it seems.
I would have been more ok with the loss if we wern’t leading at any stage we had those kents on toast for 3qrts juts couldn’t get out to a 20 point lead
I’ve seen that repeatedly. Umpire bounces it 2m towards one end, that ruckman approaches the bounce anticipating a vertical bounce, stops and jumps at he ball where the ump bounced it, gets called for blocking because he ends up between the opposition ruckman and the ball.
It is just one of the many stupid “rules” (interpretations) that we are saddled with because they won’t let the umpires use any common sense and are fixated with a hard and fast, no judgement approach.
While I’m at it, the slide rule, the sling tackle and deliberate OOB - all rules brought in for good reason and if intelligently applied would work well, all over zealously applied by robotic non thinking umpires on the instructions of umpires’ coaches who have no feel for the game.