Melbourne great Garry Lyon and AFL umpiring great Ray ‘Razor’ Chamberlain have gone head-to-head on two non-calls at the centre of last Saturday night’s epic between Adelaide and Collingwood.
It came after the ‘throwing’ of the ball from Crows guns Ben Keays and Mark Keane in the hotly-contested encounter went unpenalised, much to the frustration of Magpies players and fans.
The former was given a goal assist for his disguise of a handball late in the third quarter, as he passed the ball forward to teammate Isaac Cumming who ran into an open goalsquare to kick a goal.
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A throw from Irish product Keane also went unnoticed in the second half of the match, prompting a thorough walk-through between Chamberlain and Lyon, who was commentating the match live at the time in Adelaide.
“Yeah, so look, these are free kicks. There’s no disputing that,” Chamberlain began by telling AFL 360.
Read the full transcript between Lyon, Chamberlain and Gerard Whateley below:
Ray Chamberlain: “I think what it comes down to, is a couple of things to go: ‘How might you miss this?’ (So) I listened to the commentary Garry, and (the ball came from) a Dan Curtin chunked (kick) into the corridor. He didn’t mean it to go there, and then what happens is, as a result of that kick, the Collingwood zone and their structure is out of play. You get free transition through the middle of the ground, and the goal results. Well, the umpires’ structures are also impacted by that ball movement. If we look at the line of sight, the umpire is looking directly … (at) the back of Ben, so he can’t see those hands, right? The other umpires have tried to adjust from that transition through the middle of the ground, and they haven’t been able to get outside play.”
“The (Mark) Keane one, it’s very similar. You’ve got your outside players — all the (umpiring) coaches are begging them to do. (But) he’s looking at Keane’s back. And the umpire is inside the field of play, he’s got two players directly in his line of sight. What’s interesting, I think, is that you’ve got a boundary umpire there staring at it, and in the (Keays example) in the goalsquare, you’ve got a goal umpire who’s staring at it. In about 2007 … (it) was about three years into my career, and we had a summer where we gave whistles to all umpires and an opportunity to pay for it. Was a lukewarm response, Gary, and we shelved that after 12 months!”
Garry Lyon: “I’m gonna let you off on the Keays one, that’s absolutely explainable. No, you’re not getting off on the other one. There’s four umpires (and) he’s done that in open play; you’ve got to be in a position to call that.”
RC: “Yep. And if, and as we roll it back — and I’ll email it through to you…”
GL: “I saw it! We’ve got to be better than that.”
RC: “You can’t be everywhere, for everything!”
GL: “You’ve got to be better than that.”
RC: “Yes, and it’s (the ground) 180 metres long, and about 100 metres wide Garry.”
GL: “I understand that! It’s a throw in open play! There’s not four of you (who can) get that picked up?”
RC: “Did you see where they were standing?”
GL: “I don’t care where they were standing!”
RC: “Well you need to, because it matters!”
GL: “You can’t have a game of footy … 100% I’m letting you off on that (Keays throw). How this one can’t get picked up, like come on. Come on. We can’t have a game umpired by four people where that is not picked up. I’m sorry. “
RC: “Okay, well, I’ll show you the four umpires-”
GL: “I don’t care where they are! I’m sorry, you’ve got four of them, and the bloke (Keane) is throwing it out with no one around him.”
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Gerard Whateley: “So, a little bit of this is the players are emboldened to take their chances, because of what we did with either the actual law or the interpretation. You used to have to do this (lifts arm back mimicking a handball), and now it’s enough to do this (hit the ball with a clenched fit and almost no swing).”
RC: “So, historically, the ball needed to be projected off the ball-carrying hand by the fist — that is where the power came from, and that’s what moved the football. The rule, I’ve got it written here … the definition of it, by the laws of the game (is): ‘The act of holding the ball in one hand, and disposing of it by hitting it with a clenched fist of the other hand’. And so, from the interpretation and application perspective, you can move the ball with the ball-carrying hand — you’ve just got to catch up and get a ‘snick’ on it with the other hand. That’s play away, no free kick, as opposed to propelling the ball off the ball-carrying hand with the fist. So that point of difference is really interesting.”
“When you go back and look at Keays, who threw the ball, but almost caught up with it with the other hand. So, you can see where this, as you say, ‘emboldens’ the player who wins the football to potentially get a bit creative with the way in which they dispose.”
GW: “Give us an example, when you caught a player red-handed.”
RC: “Sam Mitchell, who’s got the fastest hands that I’ve ever seen in football … I was in a position I probably shouldn’t have been in to be fair, and he did a little throw. I was looking straight at it, so I paid it, and he just went ‘Clap, clap’. It was the best!”