AFL score review system is ‘bush league’ in competition groaning with money

At least once a quarter there is a group huddle, a consultation and a collective groan across the AFL. The goal umpire talks out of the corner of his or her mouth, the field umpire paints a square in the sky, the ARC arcs up, and the guessing game begins. The score review system is sponsored by a crypto exchange. Minutes are lost. Games are sometimes decided. Seasons are sometimes derailed. It sucks the air out of games. It is a mess. It’s an embarrassment for the competition right now.

In the wake of the goal umpiring error at the Adelaide Oval last year, we were assured things would change, that the technology would improve and that the errors would be averted. Three weeks is a fair sample size and little seems to have changed.

If anything, the majority of goal umpires have over-corrected. They appear terrified of making a howler, and review the most bleedingly obvious of calls. They reviewed a goal at the MCG on Sunday that missed the goal post by about a metre. In the first half of the Melbourne-Bulldogs game last week, they reviewed similar incidents half a dozen times.

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What exacerbates the situation, and I’m looking squarely at Channel 7 here, is the way their commentators weigh in on each review. Brian Taylor will give a frothing, factually chaotic run down on what’s happening. “I think it’s a goal, JB! “I think you’re right, BT!” Meanwhile, Blind Freddy can see the ball has barrelled into the goal post.

In the off-season, the AFL’s new head of football Laura Kane went on an overseas study tour. Certain sports, she found, lend themselves to technological intervention. The geometry of sports such as tennis and baseball make it far easier to implement. She put an extra person in the ARC. She fast-tracked the trials of chips in balls.

To Kane’s credit, she has been far more available to the media than her predecessors. By sporting administrative standards, hers is an incredibly complex, demanding and thankless role. The technology, she admits, is not ready. It hasn’t been sufficiently tested.

Preliminary testing, Kane told SEN, “is quite good in terms of tracking when the ball crosses the line and if anything has happened to the ball when it crosses the line, say a slight finger or a post brush, it can pick that up. The technology is instant and tells our officials what’s happened.”

But it’s not ready yet. It’s the result of years of underinvestment. We’re left with footage that appears to have been filmed on one of those mobile phone bricks Gordon Gekko lugged around in Wall Street.

We can’t even seem to get a camera fixed between the goal and behind posts. It says a lot that the best and most definitive vision of Ben Keays’ match-winning goal-turned-behind last year came from a punter in the crowd.

This stuff is hard. Australian football is an incredibly difficult sport to properly utilise technology. The shape of the grounds, the oval ball, the way goals often come down to the length of a player’s fingernail, all make it difficult to land on a definitive decision.

Liam Baker swore black and blue that a Port Adelaide goal brushed his finger on Sunday. The footage, as always, was inconclusive. You suspect that in years to come, incidents such as that will still be the hardest to solve with technology.

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But right now, the sport is caught in no man’s land on this issue. For the time being, it would work, maybe, if it was used as sparingly as possible. It would work, maybe, if the technology was even remotely up to the task. It would work, maybe, if the basic principle of “what can be solved, should be solved” was applied.

The AFL needs to get this right. The league is groaning with money. It is in thrall to the Rupert Murdochs and Kerry Stokes of this world. It can convince governments to spend hundreds of millions of taxpayers dollars on stadiums, while putting up bugger-all of their own money. Its players have never been more professional and its games have never been more widely watched. But its score review system is bush league, and needs to be fixed as a matter of urgency.