One of the Adelaide Football Club’s most legendary goal-kickers has grown frustrated with repeated apologies from the Australian Football League (AFL) over officiating missteps, and is now calling for tangible changes to fix a pattern of costly mistakes that have negatively impacted his team.
Taylor Walker, the Crows’ veteran forward, made his stance clear in the lead-up to Adelaide’s opening match of the annual AFL Gather Round, hosted in South Australia, against the under-pressure Carlton Blues this Thursday night.
The latest controversy surrounding AFL officiating erupted earlier this week, when the league issued a formal apology to Adelaide for a critical unpenalized violation of the six-six-six rule by the Fremantle Dockers late in their recent close encounter. Adelaide ultimately dropped the match by a margin smaller than a single goal, a result directly shaped by the missed call. This error is not an isolated incident: it marks the latest in a long string of officiating mistakes that have gone against the Crows in recent fixtures.
Walker acknowledged that human error is an unavoidable part of any sport, saying that no person is immune to making mistakes in any walk of life. But he stressed that repeated apologies mean nothing without corrective action to prevent similar errors from harming other teams in future matches.
“I don’t get sick of mistakes because I reckon everyone in this vicinity has made a mistake in their life,” Walker told reporters. “I would just like to know what we’re doing about it. Don’t continue to make apologies – tell us what you’re going to do about it. It’s not really about the Adelaide footy club at all. Let’s gather around, find a solution for it and not be a part of the mistake. It was pretty obvious, the six-six-six, wasn’t it?”
Off the officiating discussion, Walker also used his pre-match press conference to push for locking in Gather Round as a permanent long-term fixture in South Australia, after the state secured hosting rights for four years of the event. He noted that the annual round has been a runaway success in SA, with the vast majority of visiting clubs enjoying the experience of playing in the state.
“We’re very grateful as a footy club that we can open up Gather Round on a Thursday night,” he said. “As [South Australian Premier Peter] Malinauskas said, we’re pretty chuffed that SA have been able to have it for four years and hopefully we can get a deal done for a long period of time. Because when something’s not broken you don’t need to fix it and we’re doing a great job here in South Australia … most of the teams enjoy coming over here playing in Gather Round. Let’s lock it away for a long period of time.”