you're probably in mind what happened between TPP and QS.
A few 4def violations were made (small touches which were not heavy but still not allowed). In my opinion, the rules are not clear and defined enough to use them on actual cases. In addition, they contradict themself. That's what it shouldn't be, because it brings anger and wrong decisions like in this case.
I'd like to quote one sentence from the stream:
The captain takes the responsibility for himself and the team.
Let me counter that. You take the responsibility to lead the league in a neutral way. You take the responsibility to create rules which are transparent and incontrovertibly.
This is the actual rule for 3def + the picture.
2.5 The ST cannot intervene (attack, block, touch, be in front of) the DM at the left side of the RED AREA. You can intervene when the DM loses the ball or cannot keep control of the ball in the RED AREA. Also you are allowed to intervene when Team BLUE cannot keep ball under possession (which happened in the screen above because there was no way for him to actually make a pass!).If the ball gets to the right side of the RED AREA the ST is allowed to intervene and 3-def-rule won't be applied anymore. (which happened in most of the touches) In this case it won't matter if team BLUE has possession.
If you take this rule beside you watching the demo, you'll see that the only thing I did was playing like the rules told me it was allowed to (except a few violations like I admit which are around ~5, still not heavily.
A few additional quotes at this place:
Yawn: The rulebook isn’t precise and it leaves room for everyone to interpret the rules however they want.
/// The ball is inside the attacking zone and you intercepted it, 4def for sure in HCL, but because of the vague terms within the FM rulebook, you might get away with it (as the print you referred to earlier somewhere; rule 2.5)
Maddude: This zone thing is bull anyway really and there's so much grey area over 4def.
B4D4SS: idk why the game being 2D makes any difference, but admins should enforce rules if they wna stop 3def violations
TehBeast: Originally the 3 def rule was designed to prevent players from 'obvious' 4 deffing. Nowadays it seems like some strikers try to find the limit to where their actions are considered as 4 deffing. This brings up the discussion of where the limit when 3 deffing becomes 4 deffing is. It's imppssible to include very seperate situation in the rulebook which gives us two options: make the rules more specific (e.g. the ST is not allowed to touch the DM at all when the opponents are in attack) with clear consequences for players who violate the rule. The second option is to proceed with these rules and we stop complaining over every small incident.
THE POSSIBLE RULE CHANGE:
I'd like to push through a rule change which looks like this:
It is basically as clear stated as it possibly could be and there is no room of discussion in this one. If you rewatch the stream match, then you'll notice that I was playing to this rules this time and there were no complains.
Last words:
In the end, it's your decision what you're gonna do. It's not only my opinion that the rules are poorly written and it only needed one actual case to question the rules. Those are not up2date and not at the actual 2017 standard. If you're too proud and too stubborn, then keep the rules you have. You're gonna get a problem sooner or later and you're gonna stand in front of a decision you've to make where the clearly better team over 10 minutes might get a deflos which is going to ruin their chances of championship. If you call this "fair", then I'm never going to understand how you're able to sleep in peace.
QuickSwans should not get a defloss for poorly written rules and you shouldn't punish people just because they actually read the rulebook no one gives a fuck about. Take it as a opportunity to improve the current rules with the idea given above from myself and remove this defloss. Take this opportunity to keep the league competitively with clear rules.
Sincerely
Kivi the actual rulebook reader.