AFL football boss Greg Swann says upgraded AFL Review Centre (ARC) cameras will be rolled out ahead of this season’s finals series.
The ARC has produced two major talking points this season.
A delayed free kick to St Kilda’s Rowan Marshall prompted change before a clear goal to Geelong’s Ollie Dempsey was missed only weeks later.
Swann said the Dempsey decision was more the umpire failing to review than an ARC issue but flagged imminent improvements to the system.
“We get a whole new set of cameras in August, the last few games and then leading into finals. We should be able to be quicker, (with) better definition,” Swann told SEN.
“The other thing about the ARC is people complain about how long it takes, but they’ve got about 10 or 11 cameras and sometimes you need a lot of those angles to get the decision right.
“I’ve looked at some things where you have an angle where it clearly looks like it’s touched and there’s another where the ball misses by a good metre.
“It takes some time to get that right but, again, that’s in cameras that do 50 shutter speed a minute.
“We’re getting cameras that do 250 now, so they’ll be able to see a lot clearer, a lot quicker and hopefully that improves it.
“Then we might end up putting a time limit on it, but we certainly don’t want 50 (seconds).”
Swann spoke at length about the quality of umpiring, including the call that allowed Carlton forward Harry McKay to burn 41 seconds against Essendon while taking a set shot from long range in the final minutes.
He said the McKay scenario was difficult to adjudicate but similar situations would remain under review throughout the season.
“The direction is if they call it they’ve got the 30 seconds and they must start to walk in at 30 seconds,” he said.
“Our looking at that, Harry started walking in at 29. He took his sweet time to walk, I think he got up to about 40 or 41.
“He probably should have got a bit of a hurry-up at stage, but it is at the umpire’s discretion.
“It is a really interesting one because this is one interesting thing about this job. I was there, you saw it, you know, ‘Do we want it?’
“But it has been discussed before my time and one of the issues, for example, would be if you’re playing down in Tassie or Mars (Ballarat) where you’ve got a howling breeze, who are the umpires to say to someone like a Harry McKay, ‘You’re 60 out, you can’t kick it’.
“The discussion previously was if the man on the mark was 50 or outside, you can’t call it. But again there’s guys … they can kick it that far.
“It’s a difficult one to have a hard-and-fast rule, so at this stage, it’s the first one we’ve had blatantly this year … we’re not jumping at shadows at the minute, going to change it, but it is to be monitored.”
Originally published as AFL general manager Greg Swann flags a reinforcement to the goal review system