AFL umpire Simon Meredith says his team dissected their officiating performance in Collingwood’s narrow win over Adelaide “very heavily” in the wake of plenty of criticism.
Umpires meet after every game to review their performance, and Meredith said Sunday night’s was amongst the best this season.
Among numerous calls, non-decisions in the dying minutes that impacted Collingwood’s Nathan Murphy and Ash Johnson have drawn scrutiny, while an umpire also failed to allow a bloodied Murphy off the ground, leaving the young Magpies tangled up in play.
But Meredith suggested those missed calls took away from all the umpires got right throughout the fourth quarters.
“We do that (review) every game and it was probably one of the best coaching sessions I’ve been in this year so far because we had learnings out of it,” Meredith told SEN Afternoons.
“We can talk about free kicks and every decision gets looked at. We did so many good things during that game and so many correct decisions, but there were certainly a couple there towards the end that we didn’t get right and we learnt from it, we want to be better.
“The injured player going off the ground, there wasn’t a blood rule but we could have asked the trainers (if there) was there blood or just waited for that player to get off the ground.
“There’s so many learnings from that, we make sure those things don’t happen again and that’s all we can do.
“We know there’s a couple of errors there, we learnt from that and move on and try to get better and learn from those situations.”
He added: “We dissected it very heavily.”
Umpires are afforded broadcast and behind the goals footage in order to assess decisions and positioning after the game during their review.
The league on Monday admitted a free kick should have been paid to Murphy and proper process was not followed with the blood rule, but didn’t mention the missed free kick to Johnson in the goal square.
But on that call, Meredith explained that the controlling and mid-zone umpires both had their views obscured.
“Even though we do have four (umpires) out there, that (a blocked line of sight) still can happen,” he offered.
“That’s just unfortunately what happened. Could we have put it sort of together a bit and said perhaps he got him high there? Maybe, and sometimes that’s what you can do.
“But the umpire in that spot didn’t get a good enough look at it and our next mid-zone umpire just hasn’t got across far enough to have a good look at it as well.
“You can’t make it up… because the worst thing you can do it guess and it's not high and then the world collapses.
“So unfortunately it was just one we got wrong.
“We learn from it… we look at all our positioning on the ground at that time, can the mid-zone umpire push across harder, run harder, maybe gone earlier to get that better angle at it.”
Meredith will officiate his 450th game in Round 8 when Carlton hosts Brisbane on Friday night.
He sits fifth in the all-time list and has also officiated seven Grand Finals.