Umpires’ lament

SOME umpires love the look of themselves in the mirror and that’s a fact.
But so do some players, too. Most of them actually.
The difference is that people go to the football to look at the players play, not the umpires officiate.
Jeff Kennett was thrown out of the state Premier’s office for being too arrogant and opinionated.
But even arrogant and opinionated people can get it right sometimes – and in this case he has.
Most footy fans don’t want to hear from miked-up umpires during an AFL game, or any game for that matter.
But it is not the umpires that should be copping all the blame because they are still just servants of city hall like the rest of us.
They have been coached that way and told that they have to over umpire AFL games by the AFL and the rules committee.
That’s why it was great to hear SEN radio host and rules committee apologist Kevin Bartlett squirming when he was confronted on-air by a barrage of angry listeners telling him to stop stuffing the game recently.
Bartlett, who is the face of the AFL rules committee, is a major defender of changes to the rules including the hands-in-the-back regulation, and he did not like the criticism.
What every caller wanted was for umpires to ignore the ridiculous interpretations that Bartlett and his Rules Committee cohorts had asked them to use and to pay the obvious free kicks and let the incidental ones go.
That’s called common sense Kev and, fortunately for the Casey Cardinia League, the Southern Umpires Association has endeavoured to use that in these cases from day one.
Now before you think this is an apology for poor umpires, let me assure it is not.
However, credit has to go where it is due and the majority of SUA members try hard to umpire local football in the local league using common sense.
Unfortunately, they are just as susceptible to the theatrics that their AFL upstart counterparts revel in, as local players are when they watch their heroes ply their talent on the TV.
When Dale Thomas or Steve Milne slot a freakish goal from the boundary, you can guarantee that a dozen local players will be out to mirror that effort the next week – and rightfully so. That’s what we go to the footy for, after all.
It therefore stands to reason that when the local umpires watches their AFL counterparts miked up for TV and on camera every two seconds prattling on egotistically, they will start to think that they are the stars of the show here, too.
Umpires must officiate with consistency and common sense, while players need to play with discipline and skill.
If that happens for the rest of the year then the strict rule interpretations set up by Bartlett and his mates will remain irrelevant – as they should be.