Umpires must remove incentive for Joel Selwood to shrug into tackles

JOEL Selwood couldn’t care less what fans or opponents think about his ducking tendencies when the benefits are so obvious. It’s time to stop giving him the benefit of the doubt.

Joel Selwood not happy with umpire after a free kick.

JOEL Selwood will almost do anything to win.

He doesn’t care what you and I think about his ducking tendencies as long as it gets him one step closer to holding up the cup again.

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He doesn’t care that the likes of on-field rivals Sam Mitchell constantly chipped him about it when the benefits are so obvious.

Case in point, his three-card trick against Ryan Burton last Monday.

Not only did he end up winning a free kick despite clearly dropping his body height and shrugging his arm, he won a 50m penalty and subsequently goaled.

Joel Selwood cops a high tackle from Rory Sloane. Picture: Michael Klein

So he couldn’t care less about the AFL’s mandated crackdown on ducking.

Not when he continues to win high free kicks in tackles at a rate which has daylight second, his 86 tackles in that category more than 30 ahead of second-ranked Allen Christensen since 2015.

But those who believe tacklers should simply tackle lower ignore the art-form of those who elicit high free kicks on a weekly basis.

And the only way Selwood will stop shrugging off tackles for free kicks is if the reward for doing it is removed.

Selwood believes his concussion history is overblown, but at some stage the AFL needs to save him from himself and stop giving him the benefit of the doubt.

Burton had every reason to believe he had Selwood cold early in Monday’s epic contest.

In the same passage of play Selwood had already slipped one tackle from Burton, the Hawks defender cleverly letting go instead of giving up a free kick.

Umpires need to save Joel Selwood from himself.

Then he crouched low — lower than Selwood — and made a beeline for him with a tackle well below the shoulders, hitting bicep and Sherrin at the same time.

Selwood played him off a break.

He ducked into the tackle, dropped his body height with a tilt of his body, shrugged his shoulders, and spun around until he hit the MCG turf.

Under the AFL’s rules on ducking — a ball carrier is responsible if the contact is via a “shrug, drop, arm lift or duck” — the umpire should have called play on.

To be honest, it ticked every one of those boxes.

But as umpires coach Hayden Kennedy told the Herald Sun, AFL umpires officiate in real time rather than slow motion.

It means the likes of Selwood, Bulldog Toby McLean and many others continue to get away with high contact frees despite the much-vaunted crackdown last January.

The only solution is to police the rule even harder.

Jared Polec gives away a high contact free kick to Luke Shuey in the dying seconds of last year’s elimination final.

If not, we will get more situations like the Luke Shuey decision that saw Port Adelaide dispatched from the finals by West Coast last year.

Real time saw both umpires in proximity blow their whistles as Jared Polec’s tackle slipped high in the frantic last seconds.

Yet the freeze-frame showed Polec’s tackle started well below the shoulder, the trigger point for umpires to call play on.

The AFL umpires know they are on a hiding to nothing.

If they go into games with preconceived views on the likelihood of a Selwood or Shuey or Rhys Mathieson drawing free kicks they are losing their objectivity.

And if they don’t call legitimately high free kicks they aren’t protecting the players’ wellbeing.

“We had two umpires that simultaneously paid the (Shuey decision) for high contact,” Kennedy said.

“If I showed that to a group of umpires at normal speed 100 per cent would call for a high tackle.

“But if you go to slow-mo it starts on the bicep area. I wish we could umpire in freeze-frame but we don’t have that ability.”

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