EXPERIENCED umpire Brett Allen's candid admission that he paid a match-deciding free kick against Matthew Richardson in spite of his better instincts two weeks ago highlights the problem with the hands-in-the-back rule that has become the sore point of the first half of the season.

The rule protects a player who is cheated out of a contest by an opponent whose push has unbalanced him at the critical moment, and who, because of his front position, is helpless to brace himself against the contact. It honours the principle that the ball must be the first objective. Intrinsically, it is sound.

But a law, any law, is only as good as the exercise of it. Umpire Allen said he felt he had to follow instructions or face suspension. That is not umpiring, it is officiating.

Necessarily in such a chaotic game, there are many grey areas. Necessarily, no two contests are exactly alike. Necessarily, it demands that umpires do not merely apply the rules, but interpret them. Sometimes, a player with his hands in the back of another is pushing, sometimes simply holding his ground.

But when umpire Allen feels he must rigidly apply the letter of the law when all his near 350 games' worth of instinct is screaming at him to let the game take its course, something is awry. When umpire Allen thinks it better to pay a free kick he knows to be wrong than stand up for a principle he believes to be right, something is badly awry.

It is not umpire Allen's doing. The game has changed. As the stakes have increased, so has the gravity and the scrutiny. But there is proportionately less room for discretion and humour.

In some ways, it is no longer a game, but a system. If the angle, trajectory and distance of a particular kick/handpass/punch says that it is deliberately out of bounds, circumstances and a feel for the game do not come into it.

Umpires have more power, less authority. A case in point was the free kick paid against Melbourne's Brock McLean for time-wasting in the dying minutes against Collingwood on Monday. By the letter, McLean was wrong; he threw the ball away. But it was marginal.

In a previous era, a wise umpire might have warned McLean that he was treading a dangerous line. But that would entail a degree of maturity and trust in umpire/player dealings that the system appears to have crushed. Zero tolerance is now the solution to everything.

But football cannot be clockwork. In the mesmerising climax to last Friday's Essendon-West Coast match at Telstra Dome, the rules changed again; they were unilaterally abolished. This is often the way at the end of tight, tense games, notably finals.

It is human nature and who really would have it otherwise?

Perhaps there was an infringement — perhaps not — as Leo Barry took his mark for the ages at the end of the 2005 grand final, but who would have wanted a free kick paid? Probably not even West Coast fans, now that they have their premiership anyway.

For all the science now applied in football, it must and will remain a maddening game, in which one man's push-in-the-back always will be another's holding-the-ball, one man's infringement another's spoil.

Accordingly, umpires must be allowed to call it as they see it, feel it and judge it, not by prescription and rote. They must be allowed to umpire, not merely officiate. The previous hands-in-the-back regime displeased most of the people most of the time, the new one displeases even more. Ever will it be thus.

Besides, how unbendingly might the letter of the law be applied? Argued to a fine point, Allen's remarks were a criticism of an umpire, to wit, himself. Yesterday, the AFL ruled out a sanction. It exercised the virtue it appears to be denying to umpires: discretion.