daysofourlives wrote:JK wrote:Thought the umpiring was excellent this round .. Not perfect (never will be) by any means, but given it was the first week of tightened HTB interpretation I thought they did well and the games benefitted from it.
Totally agree with this. For me it wasnt the HTB free kicks that were paid, it was the adjustment of the players to move the ball on quicker and not hang onto it. It also some teams sit off a bit knowing the ball would be moved on rather than stacks on the mill.
I would love to know the ball up figures, i imagine they were well down.
Id take it a step further and get rid of prior opportunity, the players will adjust, they always do. But if they were to do this they would have to be strict on a tackle being a good one and not getting into the players back like 50% of the tackles are now.
Agree with both you blokes about the umpiring and the way the game were played on the weekend.
I didn't notice more or less ball-ups, just called bounced up and a lot quicker, which saved a lot of squabbling on the ground - the umpires were far more decisive between this and HTB. There may have been the occasional HTB which was too quick, but this was a small price to pay for the overall improvement.
There was on instance in the Geel-Rich game where the ball was kicked into a vacant fifty with two players were running back and all the other players, except maybe 1, at least 50 metres behind, and the defender managed to force a ball-up. The umpire waited until a few more players arrived before getting play going. How great would it have been if he had thrown it up straight away, one-on-one? That would stop players and coaches playing a few more players spread out around the ground.
We do need to be careful not to pay the sweater-offs, and so there needs be a small element of time to get rid of the ball.
Hopefully these changes - ball moving on, quicker, more decisive ball-ups or HTB's- will stop those instances of in the backs let go as tackles, and if we get a few, hopefully they stand out like dogs balls that they are in the back.