Shane McInerney

speaker

237 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 7 Jul

Shane McInerney’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.

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Whateley · Former AFL Umpire Shane McInerney | Whateley with Adam White (07.07.26) · 6 Jul 2026 podcast

I think one of the things too that people need to appreciate is unlike football clubs like an Eston or Kangaroos over the years and even now Richmond that have been allowed to sort of bottom out and rebuild, umpiring is one of those teams of people that can never bottom out.

So they've always got to have a top four ideally or a top six type performance if I align it to a league ladder.

And that's always been a challenge for the AFL and for umpiring to ensure that you've got the right balance of bringing on younger and experienced umpires and blending them and seeding them and maintaining those older and more experienced umpires.

Look, if all things stay the same, and what I mean by that in terms of the laws of the game, in terms of their interpretation, then the fans will need to, and teams and clubs in particular, because you find that clubs are perhaps more harsher on the consistency of the laws than anything else.

If those stakeholders are happy that there will be more errors, then you can go back to three.

I don't imagine in any universe players or fans will accept a lesser performance just for the sake of consistency.

So I think that that's an important differentiation to make.

If an umpire makes a mistake in the first five minutes, appreciate there's a school of thought to say, well, he now has to keep making that same mistake for the rest of the game so that there's consistency.

Well,

it just doesn't work like that.

The object of the game is to not make that mistake in the first five minutes.

But mistakes will happen.

But that doesn't then justify additional mistakes.

So three to four, with the style that the game is played at, with the amount of laws that are now there to make the game quicker, then moving back to three, look, you'll...

that would then just rely on a younger pool of umpires.

Um, you know, physically, um, you know, you would need to do cover, you know, 15 to 16 kilometers a game, seven kilometers a game.

There's three umpires.

Um, what does that do to your pool of umpires?

You then say, are you, are you recruiting athletes or are you recruiting good decision makers?

And, uh, it's, it's always been that that additional resource is to ensure that we've got the best decision makers in the game, uh,

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