TOPIC:

well ankorman having read your post,my love of our game has certainly declined as a result of rule changes. umpires must be totally confused these days. blaming umps is actually wrong - its the geishan led rule tamperers at afl level who are killing it.


my beloved kangaroos recently got the ruff end against eagles, but the umps are simply abiding by new and ever changing interpretations. what we old stagers see as an obvious decision is now almost a hold your breath and wait for an umps take on it. watching afl on sunday young j.darling took a straight up mark against a saint yet the ump called it a push. the game is ruined by this stuff and it turns me off this code nowdays. goal reviews, subs, etc is just americanizing everything.

i must agree to disagree re your comment on man-on-man marking contests. if ever there was an era of basically zero incentive for a contest, it is today. and as a result we have new generation afl players constantly staging for free kicks because the odds of getting a cheap kick is better than the option of a good old fashioned contest. the game overall as a result is painfully boring to watch. i hate to say it but i turn off more than ever these days.

Worse thing bout theSaints game on Sunday, is "basically" it was all let go for 3/4's THEN the umps went into paying everything, along with some very wierd decisions as well.

There was an interesting statistic displayed on a Fox footy programme recently where the differential in free kicks for and against were shown for some teams. Remarkably for a team that is so badly out of form that the differential favouring the Eagles was from memory 201. No other team quoted had a positive differential over 100. St Kilda's was -83 I think.

There was a theory that the better performing teams generally got more free kicks. That is patently not what is happening in games featuring the Eagles.

What I want and I think most people want is for there to be consistency. That is a free kick paid up one end should be paid up the other end. Aussie Rules footy the way it is umpired at the moment changes its rules from one quarter to the next and from one game to the next and from one week end to the next.

anchorman wrote: Just found those stats on another site Swan they certainly make for interesting reading.
2011.....2013
+214 Eagles
+112 Port
+49 North Melbourne
+37 Collingwood and Fremantle.
+15 Giants.
those in minus mode are.
Carlton(5),Bulldogs( 8 ),Essendon (10),Sydney(17),Geelong(31),Suns(32),Richmond(36),Crows(39),Hawks(46),Melbourne(76),Brisbane(81) and Saints(83).
Some pretty amazing discrepancies there.

When i bring this stat up to Eags fans, rather than say, yeah we "play the system" and good luck to them they actually believe they are hard done by!!! AMAZING

IMO differentials mean nothing.
So are you saying that the free kick count at the end of every game should be the same for both sides?

No doubt the Eagles are great at drawing free kicks. What is even more apparent is that the opposition know they will drop their hips to receive a high free kick but they can't tackle lower? Laughable.

I still play footy (amateurs) and when I line up against an opponent that is considerably smaller than me I make a concerted effort to tackle around his waist.

And yet the opposition still hasn't learned.

To quote a Chinese proverb;
Fool my once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

The Shiz wrote: And yet the opposition still hasn't learned.

To quote a Chinese proverb;
Fool my once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

Agree there, like i said tho, the fans still think they are getting "stiffed" by the men in green