Full match details and stats<\/a><\/p>\nA handful of players \u2013 particularly in the North Melbourne-Sydney game \u2013 appeared to hold back from the footy, preferring to be the tackler and win the free kick, although that wasn’t the case in the match at GMHBA Stadium.<\/p>\n
“I think it’s really, really confusing. It’s frustrating, to a degree. The holding the ball conversation has forever been discussed from AFL men’s to AFLW,” Lowther said in his post-match press conference after Geelong’s 18-point loss to Carlton.<\/p>\n
“Even watching the games over the weekend, like you got commentary around, ‘no one knows what’s going on’, and it felt the same today. You weren’t too sure what was going to get paid.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“There were some obvious ones, where you’re like, ‘yeah, that’s holding the ball, you can’t dive on the footy,’, it’s very up front. But just the interpretation piece, particularly for us you know, it’s not holding the ball in the front half, but it is in the back half? So the interpretation across the lines is probably hurting the competition in general.”<\/p>\n
When it comes to coaching the rule with his players, Lowther said he would continue to encourage his charges to attack the ball.<\/p>\n
“‘Stay calm’ is the is the first phrase, we said the same thing in the (coaches) box today. We can’t change the decision, but we need to make sure we’re coaching it and articulating the right way,” he said.<\/p>\n
“We’ll still coach [to] fight the tackle. We want to win possession, so to win possession we can’t be afraid of getting caught holding the ball. We just have to understand that there’s a risk if you don’t look to get the footy out, or fight away to get the ball to foot or whatever.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“So, we won’t change our approach, but it’d be great to get some clarity around how it’s being umpired, because it seems to be different from the interpretation at the start of the season.”<\/p>\n
Carlton coach Mathew Buck echoed Lowther’s sentiments after two months of football under the current interpretation.<\/p>\n
“As far as I’m concerned it is a little bit of a raffle around, ‘Will it be holding the ball? Won’t be holding the ball?’, but that’s not going to change the way the Carlton players attack the contest,” Buck said.<\/p>\n
“We’ll get in there and win the footy, and we’ll leave the umpires to make the decision, to be honest.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“Do I think we’ve got the decision-making a little bit, you know, to the negative side? I think so. I think we’re a little bit hot. I thought today there was probably a few that probably went our way, to be honest, that were a little bit hot.<\/p>\n
“Instructions (to players) don’t change. I see what the AFL are trying to do to speed up the game and the result of that is what you see today, I thought it was a great game to watch.<\/p>\n
“But we do need to ensure that the person wants to continue to go and win the footy, we don’t want to get to a point where somebody’s going to stand off because they know they’re going to be rewarded as the tackler.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Perceived inconsistencies in holding the ball free kicks has coaches worried about how players approach contests Action during…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":191813,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[560],"tags":[638,64,63,55,639,85,83],"class_list":{"0":"post-191812","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-afl","8":"tag-afl","9":"tag-au","10":"tag-australia","11":"tag-australian-football-league","12":"tag-australianfootballleague","13":"tag-sports","14":"tag-text"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191812","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=191812"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191812\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/191813"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=191812"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=191812"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=191812"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}