From the Outer: Good on you for expressing a different opinion. This is meant to be a discussion forum and your views should carry some weight.
From my perspective, I think we copped some terrible decisions yesterday, but I draw the line at the personal abuse that is aimed at the umpires. I also think we often fail to see the soft frees we get and the harsh decisions that the other team receive.
I do believe that the ‘noise of affirmation’ is a significant issue, which draws umps attention to potential free kicks, and is a major factor in the WCE stats. However, we also need to be careful with stats. 900 addition free kicks against opponents over 15 years is certainly an outlier when compared to all other teams, but it equates to about 60 p.a. or less than 3 per game. Take WCE out (wouldn’t that be nice) and the next team is getting less than 1.5 extra frees per game. Nice to have but not game breaking impacts when you think that each player probably makes more clangers per game.
I’m not dismissing that there were some very weird decisions that are worth mentioning yesterday (e.g. a couple of holding the ball calls seemed to have occurred after our players had zero time to get rid of the pill), however, I think we sometimes concentrate disproportionately on umpires decisions when they have minimal impact on the result, and when bigger issues should be our focus (our poor second quarter, our great second half, Pearce, Cerra, NGA players etc etc).
Feel free to highlight howlers by the umps or games that are decided by numerous bad decisions (which was not the case yesterday) but keep some perspective and lay off the personal stuff, they have the hardest jobs on the park.
And finally, if you think it’s fair to have open field days on umps, just remember that the same attitude is evident from parents and kids every weekend at underage games across the country and we wonder why we can’t get anyone to take up umpiring.
Please read the entire post and not get bogged down in one sentence before you pick it apart.