Incompetent. Indeed, I'd say that the one in the Dogs vs Cats game is thr worst bit of umpiring I've ever seen. To award someone a free kick and then call play on when the other side grabs it and runs away with it is something you wouldn't even see from umpires in junior football very often.Eastern wrote:Cheats or just INCOMPETENT. I have been flicking back & forth between the Cat v Dogs and Weagles V Port games and witnessed a couple of complete "Howlers" . In the first one its clear that a Cats player kicks it out on the full, the umpire even tells #8 for the Dogs that its his kick. A Cats player grabs the ball as if its his kick, kicks it up the field and the umpire calls play on. In the second there was a centre bounce in the Weagles v Port game. The Port player leaps high, misses everything and everyone, Dean Cox appeals for a free kick for about 5 seconds. The umpire then blows his whistle and awards Cox a Free Kick !!
The umpires aren't corrupt or biased (except possibly in a certain game in Perth in 2005). They are just fallible. I'm quite comfortable that, over all the Saints games I have seen in my life, the really bad calls have gone roughly 50/50 for/against us. The only games in recent years in which I though we got a really raw deal were thr aforementioned game vs Freo in 2005, vs Port Adelaide in Adelaide in 2006, vs Freo at Aurora in 2006 (I was there and the umps were shocking: which was in keeping with the overall standard of the game!) and vs the Swans in Wello the other night.
But HDTV now reveals for all to see that howler errors (i don't mean line ball decisions, but just completely and often absurdly wrong calls) are made by officials during most games: it's typically only two or three per game, but that's far too many for a professional game on which people are legally allowed to bet (which they shouldn't be IMO, but that's another story). With the "natural" rate of errors being high enough to turn games regularly, a genuinely corrupt umpire could get away with a fix quite easily.
But it's a tricky one for thr AFL: the most obvious remedies -even more umpires or greater use of technology - would slow the game down and IMO ruin it as a spectacle.
But there are two other things to lift the standard of umpiring that the AFL could do which would be relatively easy.
The first (and I've banged on about it before) would be to do what other codes have done -most notably Rugby League a few decades back after a terrible and completely unprofessional referee named Greg "Hollywood" Hartley brought the game into
almost total disrepute - and make the relationship between the umps and the players more formal: no banter, no use of names or nicknames (that's why players have numbers), no smartarse comments, only the captain of the team allowed to speak to the umpire without being spoken to first. And take thr bloody mikes away. Make the umpires feel like they are professional figures of authority and they might start behaving that way.
And the second is for the AFL to carry through with its threat to do something to players who fake for frees. I have never seen so many players running into tackles and then, having received no head high contact, jerking their heads back suddenly like they have been king hit. The umps, to their credit, have been trying to ignore these. But the consequence is that they have also been ignoring some genuine hits to the head.
Why can't the MRP go through the videos of games and slap one match bans on each player who does this. It's cheating and it's also dangerous in that it devalues the seriousness of dangerous tackles in everyone's minds.
And fine the clubs too: these manouvres are clearly drilled into players.
We don't want AFL becoming like soccer.