When Standover Tactics Meet the Whistle: The Setka Mess

I’ve seen some ordinary carry-on in my time following this game, but a bloke admitting in black and white that he threatened to hold up building sites unless head office sacked an umpire takes the cake, and not in a good way. John Setka copping to breaching the Fair Work Act over his tirade against umpiring boss Stephen McBurney isn’t just a industrial relations stoush, it’s a flashing warning sign about how far some people think they can go to bully the men in the middle.

Now I’m no fan of modern umpiring, never have been, and I’ll get to that, but there’s a world of difference between barracking hard against a decision and threatening blokes’ livelihoods because you didn’t like a free kick or a suspension. This is the bit that gets me.

What actually happened here

For those who’ve been off watching the reserves instead of following the news, Setka, the former CFMEU boss, admitted to breaching workplace law by threatening to delay AFL-related construction projects unless the league sacked McBurney, the AFL’s umpiring supremo. It’s been reported that this stemmed from Setka’s unhappiness, as a Western Bulldogs man, with umpiring decisions that went against his club. Whether you reckon the Dogs have been hard done by over the years or not, and plenty of supporters of plenty of clubs reckon the same thing about their own team most weeks, none of that gives anyone the right to threaten a man’s job over it.

The Fair Work Act breach is now a matter of record, admitted to, not alleged. What’s less clear, and what I won’t be pretending to know, is exactly what was said in private or what was going through anyone’s head at the time. But the admission itself tells you enough. When a man with that sort of industrial muscle starts making threats about construction sites to get an umpire the boot, you’ve gone well past passionate supportership and into territory that should worry every single person who loves this game.

Back in my day you just yelled at the box

I’ll admit I’m an old-fashioned sort of supporter. Back in my day, when it was still the VFL and men wore guernseys that actually covered their shoulders, if you were filthy on the umpiring you wrote a strongly worded letter to the paper, or you stood on the terrace at Princes Park and gave it to the bloke with the whistle with your own two lungs. Nobody rang up the league and threatened to shut down a building site. The idea would’ve been laughable.

What’s changed isn’t just that people are angrier, though they are, it’s that the stakes around umpiring have become so enormous, with the interchange rules and the deliberate out of bounds calls and the dreaded stand rule, that every decision feels like life and death to someone. I reckon that’s partly head office’s own doing, if I’m honest, because the more you tinker with the rulebook every single pre-season, the more confused everyone gets about what’s actually meant to happen out there, players included, and the angrier the fans get when a decision doesn’t match what they think the rule says this week versus what it said last year.

The umpires copping it from all sides

Spare a thought for the men and women in green, or whatever colour they’ve landed on this season after another jumper clash reshuffle, because they are an easy target from every direction. Coaches sledge them in press conferences without naming names directly but everyone knows who they mean. Commentators second-guess every call in slow motion from six angles, which frankly half the time just proves how hard the job actually is rather than how bad the umpire was. And now we’ve got evidence that at least one prominent figure in the game was prepared to go nuclear, threatening industrial action on building sites, to get an umpiring boss removed from his post.

That’s not a fair dinkum working environment for anybody. You can be as critical as you like of individual decisions, and believe me I will be until the day I die about some of the stuff I’ve seen paid against Carlton over the years that still makes my blood boil just thinking about it, but there’s a line between barracking and bullying, and this stepped clean over it.

Where head office sits in all this

I don’t let the AFL off the hook here either, because for years they’ve allowed a culture where umpiring is treated as this mysterious, untouchable priesthood that fans and clubs aren’t allowed to properly scrutinise, which only breeds more resentment and more conspiracy theories among supporters who reckon the fix is in for this team or that one. I don’t believe for a second umpires are deliberately favouring anyone, that’s a step too far and I won’t go there, but the secrecy around grading and review doesn’t help matters, and it creates exactly the kind of pressure-cooker atmosphere where someone eventually decides threats are a reasonable response to a bad Saturday afternoon.

If the AFL want to stop this sort of thing happening again, and I’d hope they do, they need to be more transparent about how umpiring decisions and reviews actually work, rather than leaving it to supporters’ imaginations, because an imagination filled with grievance is a dangerous thing, as this whole sorry saga proves.

What this means going forward

The admission is done, the legal process will run its course, and I won’t be speculating about what further consequences Setka might face because that’s for the proper authorities to sort out, not a grumpy columnist with a laptop and a long memory. But the message to the rest of the industrial world, the political world, and every disgruntled supporter with a bit of clout should be crystal clear: you don’t get to threaten officials, umpires, or anyone connected with this game because results didn’t go your way.

• Umpiring decisions can and should be scrutinised, loudly if necessary
• Threats against officials’ employment are a different matter entirely and shouldn’t be tolerated from anyone
• Head office needs more transparency to stop grievances boiling over into something worse

This game has survived a hundred years of blokes like me yelling at umpires from the outer, and it’ll survive this too, but only if everyone from head office down to the angriest rusted-on supporter remembers there’s a proper way to disagree. Writting a stiff letter never hurt anybody. Threatening building sites is a different kettle of fish altogether, and I reckon most decent footy people, Bulldogs supporters included, would agree with that.