What to do with the Goal Review System?

[Ozza]

Re: What to do with the Goal Review System?

I'm not a fan of video review in sport. I hate it in cricket and think it has not added to the game. Similar with AFL.

I get that you want to wipe out the obvious ones, like Tom Hawkins' in the 2009 grand final where it was clear as day that it hit the post - of course those should be reversed. But looking at whether a player got a finger tip on a ball 40 metres out from goal is surely not what we want to be looking at. How many goals in the history of the game had a finger tip on them from a snap.

And the goal umpires now never have the confidence to make a call on anything. Probably the most frustrating examples are when its either a mark or a behind - and we wait a minute or two - and the defensive team is disadvantaged while the opposition gets set up to defend.

[Boots]

Re: What to do with the Goal Review System?

Max Barry made the excellent point on the Squiggle blog that goal reviews are an abomination when it comes to 'narrative tension'. Here's the most important bit (though the whole post is kind of cool):

Bad Suspense #1: The Goal Review
Woo boy.


To be fair, let’s declare up front that the Goal Review isn’t supposed to create suspense. It’s supposed to reduce umpiring error. In a little while, I’ll attempt to convince you that this is far less important than it seems. But first let’s just tally up the damage it does to good suspense.

The Goal Review attacks the moment of resolution: the instant that tension turns into something else (ecstasy, despair). A football match lasts for a couple of hours but has a relatively small number of key moments, where tension is spiking because the play may be about to result in an important goal. These moments are an immensely valuable opportunity to reward the audience by releasing the tension they’ve built up.

...


It’s unsatisfying for fans on both sides because the Goal Review tells us that the tension we just resolved is actually getting resolved the other way, in retrospect. In storytelling terms, this is a little like an after-credits scene where the bad guy turns out to be not dead after all. Even when it’s the result you wanted, it’s not satisfying and it doesn’t feel right.


So first, we have the emotional resolution being stretched out from a single moment (great!) to a minute or two (awful). The crowd’s tension turns into the bad, self-aware kind, where they know they are subjected to an artificial pause and nothing is actually happening. The sharp emotional peak is gone; instead, we have a valley of frustrated waiting between two low hills.


Second, the act of resolution shifts from the field to the scoreboard, where the audience has to look to see which word will be flashed up on the screen. This strikes me as like the hero going home after fighting the bad guy and waiting for a phone call to confirm whether he won.


Third, no goal is safe! The audience can’t safely celebrate (or grieve) any goal unless and until it becomes absolutely clear that it won’t be reviewed. The mere threat of a review can turn quick, satisfying resolutions into slow, frustrating ones.

A secondary frustration is the dumb way the reviewer says the rationale for the ruling then says 'decision on the scoreboard' and we have to wait three more seconds for the stupid graphic to resolve when we already know the answer. The whole thing is egregiously stupid.

I think the part of the Lions game on Saturday that made me yell hardest at the TV was the goal review on JJ's goal. And I didn't even have to wait for the review to get mad at it, it made me mad the second they went to review because I'd have to sit through agonising frame-grabs in 'boomerang' mode while some fatuous airhead form the CH7 "commentary" team farted out their stupid and irrelevant feelings about it.

It's a terrible system. Just scrap it and go back to the old MkI human eyeball. On the plus side, we could supplement "we wuz robbed" umpire-bashing post mortems with endless debate about the goals the other team shouldn't have been given if only there was a review system.

[bulldogsthru&thru]

Re: What to do with the Goal Review System?

Bonts overturned goal was total BS.

For starters a goal umpire shouldn't be allowed to ask to check for a touch off the boot 40 metres out. That should be a field umpires call. The goal umpire is there to check if the ball goes through the big sticks, hits posts or touches on the line. The rest is for the 3 field umpires. I don't mind arc generally but if they are overturning stuff like Bonts one the other night they have to scrap it.

Mind you I believe that it Bonts was touched just going by his non celebration and Gardeners instant hand in the air. But that's the only evidence I have and it's speculative

Bonts overturn should have stood as a goal. Was it touched? Maybe. Going by his non-celebration it probably was. But there’s no way known it was an obvious deflection. The ball had just come of his boot so like you said, it’s all speculation.

I just can’t understand how the AFL continues to cock this up. The guessing and making decisions on faulty logic does my head in. We brought it in so that obvious mistakes wouldn’t cost teams a game let alone a premiership. We’re now in a situation where that very system will end up costing a team a flag. I still get nightmares thinking about what if moments from JJs overturn.