Questionable overrule call and time-wasting in St Kilda Saints vs West Coast Eagles game

ARC up! We can’t be certain we got the right decision

Fifty seconds. Last year Nas Wanganeen-Milera kicked two goals in less time.

Fifty seconds. That’s roughly how long play went on for to allow the AFL’s ARC time to ponder the video replays and question whether a ball had, in fact, been marked by Rowan Marshall before crossing the line. So they pondered, and they ruminated, and they prevaricated, and the ball sallied forth slowly to the wing. A throw in was able to be had, until finally the ARC interjected. Stop. Halt play. Bring it back.

The umpires did as they were told, brought play back, gave Marshall his mark and wiped the point from the scoreboard. Marshall kicked the goal and the time played was wiped like a philosophical question of whether it actually happened at all. Possessions accrued in those seconds ghosted off the stats sheet. The lost time – was it really lost? – was added to the clock.

For a professional sporting organisation the AFL spends a lot of time behaving like amateurs.

The use of technology has always been predicated on two things: (1) getting the right decision. From the video we cannot be certain we got that.

And (2) – not wasting time. We did.

Further to those points, the on-field umpires’ decisions are only overruled when there has been a clear and obvious error.

There wasn’t.

If and when the AFL defends the ARC to say the right decision was reached, and it was clear Marshall marked the ball in the field of play, the question is: Why did it take so long? If something is so clear, so obvious as an error it should be quick to see.

The Fox Sports footage we all saw and which we are advised was the only footage available to the ARC was anything but clear. It looked like the goal umpire probably got it right. If Marshall did mark it in play it was not so clear from the video I saw that you would want to jump in and bring play back a minute later.

Stand and deliver

Jamarra Ugle-Hagan did everything the much-loved stand rule asked of him. And he was punished.

He was inside the five-metre zone against Hawthorn on Saturday and an umpire called stand. So he stood. The fact that he was behind Tom Barrass who marked the ball meant he was ahead of the mark. But the rule change, to the best of our research, just says the player inside the five-metre zone has to stand, and does not reference being forward of the mark or to its side.

Logically, the umpire could have just told Ugle-Hagan to take a step back and across for the mark. It was a big penalty, at a critical time, for a player erring on the side of trying to do the right thing and being struck rigid so as not to infringe in play.

His coach Damien Hardwick – ill-advisedly biting to a question about it when he should have been more concerned with more vexing matters like why his side continue to be such flakes – questioned where the common sense was in the rule.

The problem for Hardwick was he was asking for common sense and flexibility in a rule that deliberately insists on neither. It was brought in because players were exploiting flexibility.

Whether the rule should be there at all is the bigger question. Matthew Richardson and Dane Swan on social media were clearly not fans. Craig McRae said in a recent radio interview he thought the rule and how it was policed had become comical.

He was not wrong.

The Big Three ….. er, Bottom Three

Three of the big four clubs are three of the worst four. Indeed, they are clearly the worst three.

It’s the AFL’s nightmare scenario: Richmond, Carlton, Essendon occupying the bottom three places on the ladder with two wins between them after seven games each. Richmond have a percentage of 54 and even that seems flattering.

Yes, every team needs to take their turn, someone needs to be at the bottom, but the impact on the AFL and in particular the money in the game over the medium term is profound from the biggest clubs being down for so long. This is not an argument to make sure the league always has a less-loved club holding up the ladder, but the ability to change a list and to rebuild has never been harder or slower.

It is also a reality that if the big three stay down at length the AFL will be confronting a tune-out factor of potentially hundreds of thousands of football fans who despair at the time it takes to improve. Prospective broadcast rights buyers will likewise look critically at the same idea.

Despite the club’s recent dynasty these are not new maladies for Richmond who have instigated the most aggressive list rebuild seen. The sight of Shai Bolton winning the best-on-ground medal on Saturday night in a Fremantle team that included Murphy Reid will have been a moment of frustration for Tiger fans. The two decisions, letting Bolton go and not picking Reid in that draft, feed the doubt on how long this rebuild is going to take?

Richmond still have enough senior players to have a right to expect to be better than a last quarter blow out seen on Friday night against a side, Melbourne, that should not be a peer. Their recent success also rightly buys the club time and the fair assumption they will get it right because they got it right last time. But questions start to be asked about the timeframe Last year delivered more wins than expected, but this year has so far felt like a step back.

Presently the bad three is not yet hurting the AFL when 92,000 people still filed in for Anzac Day a week after 80,000 turned out to Collingwood-Carlton, which unlike Anzac Day was at least a close contest if you can recall it through the fog of the Elijah Hollands matter.

Huge crowds continue to turn out annually for Anzac Day because it is an event – not because of a strong expectation of Essendon win. A team that has won one game in 20 is not the form line to build expectations. An encouraging fortnight created the idea they might have developed a new momentum. The first half of Saturday’s game, too, was promising, but then it fell to pieces. Essendon once more decided surrender was a reasonable option.

They allowed a team that had not been able to kick 100 points in nearly a year to kick 137 against them.

Sure Essendon are young, and Collingwood most certainly isn’t. And the Bombers are rebuilding so they have to expect these sorts of moments. But that is the problem, they do have that as an expectation. It has become the same at Richmond.

Across the board Essendon might be young but at the centre bounce, where they lost clearances 20-9, they had their first-choice options of Andy McGrath, Zach Merrett, Darcy Parish and Sam Durham all scrapping about beneath the ruck of Peter Wright and Lachlan Blakiston.

Blakiston was playing his 18th game, but he’s also 27 years old. He might be inexperienced at the level, but he’s hardly inexperienced. He was opposed to Oscar Steene who is 22 and playing his fifth game. Youth is not Blakiston’s alibi nor Wright’s. Wright’s been good in the role so far this year but like his midfield was beaten on Saturday.

The Essendon captain took on the job of running with Nick Daicos. Daicos got it 42 times and, but for wayward goal kicking and Methuselah – ala Scott Pendlebury – wearing number 10, he would have won the Anzac medal.

Merrett did as Merrett does and was excellent in periods but looked around for help and got none. He also though only had two clearances for the game. Parish got a lot of the ball, but you’d struggle to recall a meaningful possession among them. That sentence might have been cut and pasted from many previous match reports. Durham is a trier.

The point of this is they were not young where it mattered. They were smashed in the middle. Yes, they have a bunch of promising kids who had two good matches that backed the notion they’re on the right track, but at Essendon, like at Richmond and like at the AFL, now they are asking how long is this going to take?

Carlton after the most wretched week at least won a last quarter. That is the smallest of small mercies.

King move

Steven King might prove to be a good coach. He might not, though the signs are more than encouraging. But he has already shown himself to have a good feel for his players.

Letting Kysaiah Pickett go to Darwin last week for five days between matches was done not in the hope of getting the most out of the player this week – though it did – it was about understanding the player and what he needs. It took guts from a first year coach to do that and not fall into an old coaching trope of treating all players the same.

That Pickett came back and played a blinder off no training should be a surprise but isn’t. He is genuinely elite now. King recognised you don’t treat all your players the same. You tailor things for the personalities and lives of individuals. You are sensitive to the emotions and needs of your players.

A player seeing that you see them in this way is just as valuable as whether Kozzy came back and did what he did.

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