R10

If there's one thing that drives the decent, honest footy-goer crazy, it's the current craze of drawing a high tackle free from ducking, draping, head-butting etc. A couple of weeks back I endured watching Rhys Mathieson's dubious debut, wherein he cheated his way to no less than 6 free kicks through perfectly timed collapsing of his undercarriage as he was being tackled. Sucked the maggots in every single time but one, where he was rightly pinged for holding

And while Lindsay Thomas was in the news last week for the same misdemeanour, apparently his numbers aren't as incriminating, with something like 4 high-tackle frees for to date for the whole season.

I took it upon myself to do some research to try to ascertain whether this is a new problem.
As you can see by the images below, it seems this has been going on for a while now.

 Meanwhile here's where we're at: