IT'S BEEN the type of week to get you peeping over your shoulder, hearing footsteps.

It started on Sunday at the market where I picked up a rockmelon for closer scrutiny. Suddenly a bloke grabbed me from behind and rode me into the floor among the loose lettuce leaves and a runaway onion.

The crowd chorused "Fruit!!!" and the young woman behind the counter flexed at the knees, spread her arms in a cross-shape in front of her body, uncrossed them with a tremendous flourish, whereupon the bloke lying firmly on my back was handed the cantaloupe.

He walked away with the melon and I had to pay. Not only was my protest that I had been in possession for a mere fraction of a second ignored, I was booted out of the stall and sent 50 metres down the lane.

This left me standing outside another vegetable shop where the pumpkins looked good. I picked up a modest-sized one to check its weight. Suddenly my lights went out.

I realised later that this time there were two of them. Hit me from either side. One had me in a head-lock while the other wrapped me up in a proverbial strait-jacket, crushing the pumpkin against my ribs. Three bodies, two of them doing everything to ensure I couldn't release the pumpkin; there was no way I could dispose of it.

This time I didn't hear the crowd but I was told later there was an almighty roar. Neither did I see the classical front-of-body arm-cross executed from the half-squat position by the cashier, but I do recall the pumpkin being taken from me as though I was a criminal.

"You made no attempt," I heard the cashier say. "I couldn't get it out," was my feeble, unacknowledged retort. Once again, I paid, while one of the two tacklers took the free pumpkin.

Such has been life since Collingwood's tackling-inspired win over Geelong nine days ago. Everyone's talking tackling; everyone wants to do it. If you listen to the coaches, past and present, footy has become a game of tackler-takes-all.

And the umpires seem to agree. In that Friday night game, 15 holding-the-ball free kicks were paid. Against a modern backdrop of low free-kick counts, that is an extraordinarily high number to be awarded in one game against the collective ball-player.

It is indicative of a modern approach to umpiring that gives coaches what they want. Melbourne coach Dean Bailey said during the week: "I have got no doubt, tackling is important and it should be rewarded."

Why? Why should the execution of the skill of tackling be rewarded in a way that other skills aren't? Robert Flower didn't earn free kicks for brilliant blind turns and neither did Darrel Baldock for his ball-handling. These skills brought their own rewards. That's what tackling should do. It can stop the opposition's movement and ultimately strip it of the ball. That's the reward.

Free kicks should be awarded against miscreants: either for illegal tackles or for a failure of intent on the part of the ball-carrier to keep the game in motion. Talk of "rewarding the tackler", simply for the execution of his tackle, is nonsense.

It plays to the crowd, which loves the chorus of "ball", pleases the coaches, who are delighted when their tackling message brings rewards, and reinforces a certain macho-element to a game that some complain is becoming "like basketball". But it isn't everyone's cup of tea, and it raises the legitimate question as to whether it's in keeping with the traditional spirit of a game that once prided itself on ensuring the rights of the ball player.

Even Tom Hafey, perhaps the first coach to elevate tackling beyond the level of a supplementary skill, recognises that this might be an issue. In his typically no-frills way, Hafey acknowledges the possibility that the tackler now "has a better chance of gettin' a free kick than the feller he's tackled".

Among this year's Australian Football Hall of Fame inductees was Queensland umpire Tom McArthur, who officiated in a national record 502 senior games. Fellow Hall of Fame member Bill Deller says McArthur had as good a capacity to interpret the long-vexatious holding the man/holding the ball rules as anyone he's seen.

McArthur admits to feeling "irritated" at the modern handling of the holding the ball rule. He says that umpires used to operate on the basis that "the spirit of the game was to keep the ball in motion". Today, when a player is tackled and the ball spills, the game is frequently stopped and a free kick paid. The reason: to reward the tackler.

Once, I used to argue that the reason Australian football was a better game than either rugby code was that tackling wasn't the primary skill. I'm no longer sure that's the case.

Perhaps that is evolution and one can't argue against that. But what one can rail against is the glorification of tackling that the awarding of free kicks for so-called "perfect tackles" institutionalises. Let the game go on and punish the real enemy of a continuous game: the team, and players, who at every opportunity seek to grind it to a halt.