This scenario shows the difficulty in balancing the need for flow and penalizing players who breach the rules. A free hit is awarded to the attack 1-2m outside the circle and inside the 5m dotted line. There is sufficient time for the defenders to back off 5m and the umpire takes the opportunity to warn them verbally to do so. Instead, the defender who committed the foul in particular is moving even closer to the free hit before it’s taken.
From the body language of the attacker, she was intending to pass back the whole time. However, if she had been given 5m, would she have seen the additional space and attempted something else? In this situation, playing on feels like the best option but it’s worth examining the times we favour flow to assess whether we could be giving better attacking opportunities to the fouled player or team.
