The Brisbane Lions have secured a slice of history and will be the answer to an obscure trivia question forever more.
The champion Aussie Rules side will be the last to win an AFL premiership where the centre bounce was used.
The AFL today announced it had scrapped the centre bounce, which has been used to start quarters and restart games after a goal, for more than 130 years.
New AFL football boss Greg Swann said the decision was made with umpire health and safety in mind, as well as a desire to create consistency across all competitions, with the bounce optional in the SANFL and WAFL, and not in use in junior and talent pathways.
Mr Swann said while the bounce was steeped in tradition the game had evolved and the benefits of removing the bounce were too big to ignore.
“We’ve got pathways and umpires coming through, we’ve got some fantastic decision makers in those groups, but they can’t bounce the ball,” he said.
“That’s been an issue, and we need to make that pool of umpires bigger. The other thing that we think that will help in that space is [it’s] a skill, you have to put a fair bit of time into practicing. What we’d rather do is have the umpires putting their skills into making the correct decisions.
“We’ve spoken to a lot of former players about getting involved in umpiring, all of them talk about it’s too hard to bounce the ball, so hopefully that helps with that. And we’ve got some terrific female umpires as well who just struggle physically to get the ball up as high as they need, [who are] good decision makers, and this should help that too.”
Mr Swann said umpires throwing the ball up, instead, would lead to fewer collisions between the whistleblowers and players.
“We also anticipate this decision will be safer for umpires and players at the contest and lessen the likelihood of umpire contact at the restart,” he said.
