Full match coverage and stats<\/a><\/p>\nPrior to the season the AFL tightened up the interpretation of holding the ball, and free kicks have increased off the back of that shift.<\/p>\n
“I kind of understand what the AFL are trying to do with it, and understand that umpiring is very difficult. I don’t like it when the ball-carrier is not getting rewarded, when the tackler is now getting rewarded. I really don’t like that,” Webster said.<\/p>\n
“And some of those decisions today were way too hot. I think what we’re asking the player to do, in that sense, is like we’re better off not trying to win the ball sometimes now, just tap it on, and I don’t think that’s the way the game should be played.<\/p>\n
“Like, there is a contested part of the game, and I understand they’re trying to get the ball moving, but at the moment I think it’s gone a little bit too far one way and I’d like to see it pulled back\u2026 a lot of times today the ball is out and trying to get it in motion, and then a free kick is actually paid to slow it back up again.”<\/p>\n
Captain Emily Bates gave away six free kicks for the match, most of which were for holding the ball, while fellow midfielder Laura Stone gave away four.<\/p>\n
Hawthorn was seriously challenged by Carlton’s defensive, high pressure game, and almost gave up the lead during the final quarter, but ultimately fought out the gritty win, helped along by a late Aine McDonagh goal.<\/p>\n
“I thought that Carlton brought a lot of heat, I thought they were probably stronger in the contest a little bit. Obviously, we controlled that game I think from a territory standpoint, couldn’t score, they got us out the back a couple of times. But I think in terms of what we want to do and what we want to be, we were a fair way away from that,” Webster said.<\/p>\n
For Carlton coach Mathew Buck, the disappointment of the loss was broken up by the pride of how his developing team fought against a highly fancied opposition.<\/p>\n
“You’ve got to take the good with the bad. So, the resilience of the team to keep turning up at a contest and persist, persist was great. We’ve worked on our resilience, it’s been a big piece that we’ve worked on, and to see it get implemented tonight was good, but we’re also disappointed,” Buck said.<\/p>\n
“You’ve got to take your moments, so there’ll be a lot of learning (to) come out of it as well.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Hawthorn coach Daniel Webster has taken aim at the new adjudication of the holding the ball rule following…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":90139,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[560],"tags":[638,64,63,55,639,85,83],"class_list":["post-90138","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-afl","tag-afl","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-australian-football-league","tag-australianfootballleague","tag-sports","tag-text"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90138","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=90138"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90138\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/90139"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=90138"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=90138"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=90138"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}