I love football. I don't, however, love endless circular debates about elements of it which can never really be won or lost - and which distract from the whole point of the exercise.
And that's pretty much how I feel whenever the topic turns to umpiring, which it's been doing a lot lately. Yes, even more than usual, which is always a lot.
It will again this week, too, following pointed comments from Carlton coach Michael Voss and Gold Coast's Damien Hardwick, plus controversial decisions paid late in the Western Bulldogs-Sydney clash last Thursday, and the Fremantle-Collingwood draw the following evening.
My take? In a nutshell, it's this. I don't think umpiring is significantly better or worse than it's ever been during my 41 years watching, writing and talking about VFL then AFL football for a living. Yes, really. In fact, if you listen to the AFL (and many conspiracy theorists won't, of course) decision-making is actually more accurate so far this season than last.
What has changed, however, is the intensity of the forensic scrutiny applied now to virtually everything that happens across nine games of AFL football each week, including or especially when, it comes to their adjudication.
It's a far, far cry from the old six games played simultaneously, of which only three were even captured for television, with perhaps one five-minute segment called "What's Your Decision?" on "World of Sport" every Sunday afternoon.
Is that in itself a problem? Depends on where you sit. Endless conversations about whether this or that umpire's call was correct or not bore me silly. Even five minutes after I've teed about a call (which I did after the Sullivan free kick), let alone a couple of days later.
Perhaps, though, they're engaging and uncomplicated enough for people who aren't sufficiently obsessed with the game or feel intimidated attempting to drill down on whether St Kilda's problems are due to its poor midfield or its lack of adventurousness with ball in hand.
And that's a lot of people. How do I know? Because as I write this piece, my Facebook notifications on my PC are still audibly "pinging" every 30 seconds as someone else has their two bob's worth on my post about the free kick awarded against Collingwood's Lachie Sullivan late in the draw against Fremantle on Friday night.
That's a week after they were pinging repeatedly after Adelaide speedster Izak Rankine was penalised for running too far without bouncing as he sped along the members' wing against Collingwood.
And a couple of weeks after the seemingly never-ending debate surrounding the failure to pay advantage on a Geelong free kick, thus disallowing Jeremy Cameron's "goal" which would have put the Cats within a point of Port Adelaide with two minutes left on the clock.
The obvious common denominator in all these cases is that they happened in the dying minutes of a game firmly on the line. Hence why they are focused upon whilst equivalent scenarios early in games or in lopsided contests are overlooked.
Such incidents inevitably also lead to mass outbreaks of wisdom in hindsight on social media. It was amazing after the Sullivan free kick just how many people arrogantly scoffed at those unaware of the AFL instruction to players to only hand the ball back to umpires at stoppages, despite the fact the likes of Collingwood coach Craig McRae and the great Leigh Matthews claimed to be unaware of it.
But there's a fundamental flaw here in believing that the "state of umpiring" is some sort of crisis (and I don't) which can be solved (it can't).
Why not? Because while the biggest bugbear of the football public about umpiring is lack of consistency, that will always be an issue for one very simple reason. That possibly no other game in the world has a set of rules as reliant upon interpretation as Australian football.
The AFL has had a crack at attempting to simplify the rules previously, re-writing various rules to make them more definitive, and instituting stricter interpretations like, for a time, the "hands-in-the-back" crackdown, subsequently relaxed again after much angst ensued. But such measures simply cannot work in a game with so much inherent "grey", unlike, say, tennis.
With the exception of scoring, is there any rule in our game not requiring a judgement call of some sort? About tackles most obviously, but about pushes, about marks, about handballs, about distance run, even penalties on top of those immediate penalties?
Then think of all the additional rules ushered in during the AFL era, not to mention the extra concentration required in enforcing them constantly (for example, umpires can no longer mentally relax even for a moment while a player takes a kick from a mark or free kick because of ensuring the opponent on the mark doesn't move).
And now with four field umpires, there's yet another potentially differing voice to those of the other officials charged with policing a game, let alone differences from game to different game. It's pretty clear complete consistency is a utopia which will never be reached.
That's why, in my view, insisting that umpires officiate "to the letter of the law" is naïve when so many of those laws are ambiguous. I also think were the rules to be policed as officiously as some suggest in these sorts of debates, there would be such an upsurge in free kicks that the game as a spectacle would be damaged further.
Interpretation in AFL umpiring I reckon is a necessary evil. That, however, means that what one umpire might consider over-zealousness is another's regulation call. Or rather, yes, inconsistency. And what about the extent to which their mindset might fluctuate depending upon a game's circumstances?
This isn't a slight on umpire Mathew Nicholls, but I found it interesting that it was he who awarded that critical free kick against Sullivan last Friday night, after it had been he who was visibly annoyed earlier at Collingwood veteran Steele Sidebottom's failure to hand the ball back to him at another stoppage.
Would he have been as inclined to penalise Sullivan had Sidebottom and other Magpies been dutifully handing him the ball all night?
And why wasn't the umpire similarly inclined to award a free kick to Brisbane against Hawthorn at Marvel Stadium on Sunday just before half-time when the Hawks' James Worpel picked the ball up after a throw-up had been called and handed it to teammate Will Day rather than the umpire? Ditto after Brisbane's Lachie Neale handed the ball to teammate Cam Rayner at a stoppage, who gave it to the umpire?
Why wasn't this a free kick 🤔 #AFLHawksLions #AFL pic.twitter.com/HdEdcrVeDb
— JAKE FLAGPIES23 🏆🖤🤍 (@IncrediblyBozza) May 26, 2024
Again, you can call that inconsistency. But really, isn't it more just about different interpretation? And when so many rules are so nebulous as our game's, is all the coaching and training in the world going to make an entire umpiring list see every circumstance similarly? Of course not.
The answer to the ongoing hand-wringing about umpiring is, however unsatisfactory, that there actually is no answer.
It's how much we choose to focus on this or that moment from a game which goes for two hours, or alternatively look at those moments in the context of the bigger picture of the entire game, which will determine how we see things.
On that score, people can and will suit themselves. Me? I just know I wouldn't love the game nearly as much if I was so obsessed with umpiring all the time that I forgot to actually enjoy what is still in my opinion the best sport in the world.
You can read more of Rohan Connolly's work at FOOTYOLOGY.