The umpiring during Thursday night’s Collingwood versus Geelong game was criticised in the aftermath for being lopsided.
The Magpies received 22 free kicks for the game to the Cats’ 10 in their 22-point win.
Umpire Ray Chamberlain, who officiated in the match, revealed that upon review the free kick count should have gone Collingwood’s way more than it actually did.
“I’m pretty happy to be pretty transparent about that. We had a very good night from an umpiring perspective,” he told SEN’s Whateley.
“I know there are things in particular that a fan through that lens might find alarming. So initially the first thing hit my SMS was a lopsided free kick count.
“I think it was 22 to 10 to Collingwood. Now, on review after having all of our assessment that number was meant to look more like 25-8.
“Sometimes games are incredibly imbalanced in how those things happen. In some games we may only pay 20 free kicks. In some games we pay 50 because some games are played in a contested manner and some aren’t, different game styles, all sorts of things that get thrown up.
“Holding the ball was one thing – we had three holding the ball errors in our game on Thursday night.
“It wasn’t the biggest issue for us. We had a couple of other issues around some marking contest situations, but overall from a decisional perspective, Thursday night we had a good night. We had an above average night in terms of our accuracy.”
Chamberlain said he got a holding the ball free kick wrong during the game and broke down his thought process.
“I missed a holding the ball against Gary Ablett,” he said.
“So he’s in contest, ball is in dispute players go to ground and it is in between both of their legs.
“The ball half comes out, it’s still in between both of them, and Gary puts his hand on the ball and then he’s kind of half rolled over the top of by a tackler.
“So I didn’t think that he really dragged it back in so I gave him the benefit of the doubt and I called for a ball-up.
“Now you look on review and they’ve got a camera angle and he definitely extends his arm out and he does move the ball back in.
“It would be an incredibly stiff decision, but an accurate one had I paid holding the ball then.
“I called for a bounce. No one mentioned it in the commentary, but letter of the law is to pay holding the ball there, so that’s my error.
“Do I think that’s a gross error? Not in the run of the game, I don’t. It’s not something where I don’t know the rule. I made a judgement call and it was proven to be incorrect that judgement and I can understand why.
“I haven’t made another one of those all year so I’m not going to spend a lot of time on it.”
Chamberlain was scheduled to umpire in last Sunday night’s Derby, but a minor back injury flared up forcing him to sit the game out.
Collingwood has won the free kick differential in 39 of a possible 56 games since the start of 2018.