Re: AFL Rd 20 2023 Post Game Prognostications Carlton vs Collingwood
Reply #82 –
The rucks from both teams had little impact and we won the clearances despite being behind in the hitouts. Pittonet managed to get his hands on a couple of ground balls while De Koning was fumbly and dropped marks he'd normally clunk. Two marks from your rucks is way below par. Collingwood could have put Cox's jersey on a High and Mighty store dummy and it would have had more impact. Cameron had some influence around the ground with five marks.
In those circumstances, free kicks in the ruck can be decisive and some of the decisions on Friday were hard to follow. De Koning was penalised at the first bounce for a "body check". I'm not sure what that is but it seemed to me that he was simply going for the ball. De Koning was penalised again when the bounce favoured his side of the circle and he stood under the ball. Was he supposed to run backwards away from the ball? Cameron applied virtually identical "body checks" to Pitto as the first quarter progressed and it was "play on" every time.
In the second quarter Cox applied a headlock to Charlie during a ruck contest and the obvious free was paid. Not even Collingwood supporters could complain about that ... or could they?
In the last quarter McStay was penalised for blocking De Koning. McStay clearly held De Koning away from the ball drop and the free kick was deserved. Not long after, Cameron applied a more physical block on Pitto and Pitto was penalised for high contact despite Cameron clearly initiating the contact.
That's five free kicks for ruck infringements with two going our way, but that's not really the point. The point is that there's no logic or consistency to the way ruck infringements are adjudicated. If the two frees against De Koning were correct, at least ten other similar frees should have been paid. I don't know if there's much communication between the AFL and clubs about what constitutes a ruck infringement, but there should be more. It would be interesting to hear what the AFL/umpires think De Koning should have done when the ball bounced towards his side of the circle