NOTTHATAWKWARD wrote:Please elaborate, not baiting just generally interested because I think I know what your on about, would just like some clarification and am also interested in other theories.kalsaint wrote:While these appear like sour grapes as I know as we wernt good enough over the full year, the former reasons do continue to contrubute to a level of inequallity that the AFL dont allow with respect other inequalities like villification, so why not improve these other areas too?
I can provide numerous examples here but wont and just hope for greater equality next year. Adrian Anderson believes he shows integrity? Look again I say. It's still wanting
I have responded on many posts over the year on these:
1 Umpires - difficult job as rules and particularly intrepretations have change regularly over the last 3-4 years. They get deciaions wrong often under crowd pressurelate in a game that is of consequence. They are humnas and need more technological help such as; replays, better placed cameras, last 10 minutes to allow significant intrusion by technology used for reviews if required, as games are won or lost by decisions at this time of the game.
2 AFL change rules, egs are;
2.1 Ruck contacts run ups and contact versus no contact. This killed smaller athletic rucks like Mebournes White but helped others like Cox massively. The giants came back but further rule changes around player making play for the ball led to longer taps and running rucks again later. Umpires are still catching up on these and still get decision wrong and now pay really soft frees to rucks (ask Cox).
2.2 Out of bounds rulings; deliberate out of bounds with forward ball movement?!!, players being pushed near boundary to try to get ball to contact pushed player resulting in OOB, blocks at clearances on key players (started with Bhudda Hocking on Harvey but really has grown significantly in lat 3 years). Players now getting smashed like the ruckmen were previously so what was the point of the ruck changes?
2.3 Players fall on the player with teh ball and the player with the ball is penalised. He has to be super human to remove the weight of packs but umpires still penalise these guys often late in ctirical games, when worn out and tiered, but not consistently early in games when fresh, just they try to keep the game moving and clear packs. Makes some games like Rugby. This never happened before and look ugly because coaches adapted to the new rules to offset the rule change.
2.4 Umpires should not be in real estate. the 50 metre penalty has a new variance being dependent on the umpire at the time. Lines on teh ground are not used as reference points and should be. Lights off the ground could provide better guidance to umpires on distances.
2.5 The push in the back rule. This is not doing what it was designed for, that is; to stop damage to players. Players now pull the tackling player or take a dive (now at higher game speed so its not easily discernible) to procure free kicks. Tackling players often dont touch a falling tackled player but still get kicks paid against them!!!
2.6 Hands in teh back while marking. Was designed to be 2 clear movements rather than protecting space. The rule was brough in with gusro but by years end had nearly disappeared with lots of confusion when it rerappeared in the finals of 2010. It returned with more definition and purpose in 2011 but umpires found this difficult to judge consisitently so tend to pluck frees based on crow noise rather than player movement or activity, often late in agame when not previously called.
2.7 Sweeping of the arm during marking. Not many defenders liked this as teams had developed smaller running defenses that no longer could match the new rule requirement. The interpretation changesd over a 18 month period and now is missed 80% of the time so were back to 2008 rules again. Guys like Nick benefitted from this rule and as defenders developed tunnelling to offset it now Nick takes less big contested marks than he used to. The consequence is that coaches change team plays and smaller defenders are now able to smash the arms of leading forwards without penalty regularly. The bigger strongly build forwards dont suffer so much from these defensive ploys.
2.8 The "Dont Argue" is applied and the player is tackled but not often penalised unless the tackle is followed through to eventually pin an arm. This favours bigger players. It never was called that way previously.
2.9 Kicking in danger; This is virtually never applied but often is used to even out a poor earlier decision when a player is caught up in the contest, looks like he is to lose the ball but gets a kick to his body while players scramble for the ball. This provides the umpire with a free hit to allow a defender to receive a penalty when in acyual fact would normally have lost the ball with newer interpretations. Usaually this happens closer to the end of games to avoid a contentious free kick to forwards. Not applied consistently.
2.10 I can gp on but wont.
3 Short term ALF management rule changes. Short term management decisions actually destroys some clubs recruitment choices and leads to another 1 or 2 years of team development to cater for the change. The reason is that the coach is always going to seek ways tio negte the rule change legally. This often required a differnt team balance in term of pure speed, power speed for short intervals, vertical elevation, scragging (2 that I missed above), player run and kick arcs, body size for home and away versus finals interpretations etc etc.
3.1 In short there are clubs that have spend heaps of money on recruitment to make poor choices due to AFL short term changes. I see this as totally unfair. An example is when Brisbane had the running but big bodied players in and under players that many teams started to develop. Geelong, Saints and Fremantle come to mind here. Geelong developed a more even team skill set and a different game plan that suited the changes at the time. Saints got slow (Goddard put on 7 kgs one preseason to meet the demand). Fremantle became big and tall but were run off the park by many teams as others sought speed and made the correct choice. Terry Wallace made a comment on radio when coaching Richmond for a game in Perth against Freo. He said he walked onto the ground and thought, wow Freo are big and he immediately started small and directed Richmond to run them off their legs. They won by +50points. I t took 85 years for Freo to recover the team size and skillset to become competitive again. I think this is toally unfair and attributed alot to AFL Management changing the game too quickly at times. It means teams at different stage of recruitment basically have to get out a crystal ball for the long term.
3.2 Changes like this are not acceptable from a business (AFL) that is managing an organisation and driving equal opportunity in other ways. I respect their choice to outlaw villification etc but the same should occur from them to the clubs to maintain equal opportunity in their club management. Things to stablilse and maintain integrity to this EEO are; fixtures, travel interstate, consecutive breaks should not vastly favour any particular club.
3.3 If they were to get a mathematician to run multi variable analysis they should be able to pick up the key impacts on the game Equal Opportunities and resolve much of this. Without it they are not standing by their own policy and values espoused on honesty, integrity and fairness. Worst still they say one thing and dont behave that way. Needs more work here Andrew and Adrian.
in one of the best games of footy I've been to EVER! where are the mighty Tigers now? The loss against Richmond probably came down to our missing easy set shots at crucial stages of the game, I won't hear a word of criticism regarding our effort and commitment in that game.
( God help me)