Richmond spearhead Jack Riewoldt believes “no one has an idea” of what constitutes umpire dissent after the controversial free kick against Stephen Coniglio in Round 3.
The free kick against Coniglio came at a crucial stage of Carlton’s win over Greater Western Sydney on Saturday, with the AFL on Monday releasing a statement from umpiring boss Dan Richardson.
In that statement, Richardson said while players and coaches “get emotional, or become overly expressive when under pressure, “we also have umpires with differing levels of temperament”.
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However Richardson declared: “If there was no challenge to the decision, regardless of personal opinion on the threshold, then no free kick could or would have been paid.”
Riewoldt told AFL 360 the decision against Coniglio had left him confused over the threshold for dissent.
“No one has an idea because the umpires, they’ve admitted each umpire has got a different emotional reaction to players, so how are we to know whether we catch someone on a bad day or a good day?”, he said.
“There’s moments after that dissent free kick where players are doing the exact same thing and we don’t get the same result. So I’m scratching my head.
“I would’ve said way worse things and done more demonstrative stuff to senior umpires and just had a normal conversation or just asked a question, which you do sometimes – there’s four umpires, one is genuinely around the centre of the ground or with the forwards – (asking) ‘Why is that a free kick?’
“That’s a bit of a natural reaction, but that could be deemed as dissent, which is the Coniglio example there. I’m still scratching my head about it and I think most of the footy public are as well.”
Sam Docherty, who was close to the action at the time of the free kick, admitted he was not aware why it was paid.
“I had no idea. I had to ask the umpire was and he said ‘Dissent’ … I assumed that it was he swore at him or something, that’s my initial reaction. Having seen it after, it does happen a lot in games,” he said.
“I had a presser yesterday and my response to it all is it’s going to be hard with human error in our game. I think there’s always going to be a sense of grey in our game and we do have to accept that’s part of it and umpires are humans, they’re going to make mistakes just like we as players make mistakes.
“It would be nice to know whether that’s going to be an ongoing thing moving forward, if that’s sort of back to the start of last year where that was 100 per cent a free kick. It was a really costly moment in that game of footy so if I was probably on the other side I’d be a bit more flat about it but we got the win off the back of it.”
