By Brad Kingsbury
CASEYCardinia League fans can rest easy after senior Southern Umpires Association (SUA) officials rejected the AFL’s covert push to outlaw the hipandshoulder bump.
The twomatch suspension incurred by Port Adelaide star Byron Pickett for his bump on Carlton’s Simon Wiggins last weekend, sent tremors through the local football community with concerns that local umpires would start penalising players for similar contact as finals approached.
However SUA umpires coach Michael Viney, together with association president (and senior umpire) Jason Hughes, made it clear that the style of umpiring would not change and that the relevance of their AFL counterparts was marginal.
“It’s a local competition and we have to use common sense. Contact is part of the game,” Hughes said.
“With finals coming up, our emphasis will be on trying to let the players play the game and only get involved when we have to.
“Our focus is on local football and always will be. We’ve never tried to be AFL umpires,” he said.
Viney said that the SUA would not and never had tried to copy AFL umpires and in fact, used VFL rather than AFL video footage during instruction and demonstration sessions.
Viney said that common sense suggested that the pace of the game at local level, together with the skill differences of players, meant that physical contact was more prevalent but less dangerous than at the elite level.
SUA umpires were aware of that and officiated accordingly.
He said, as a coach, it was annoying on the odd occasion that an umpire watched a Friday night AFL match and then came out the next day and started paying decisions along those lines, but fortunately that did not happen often.
Viney said the Pickett incident had not been discussed at SUA meetings and was not an issue for local umpires.
