Ross Lyon has expressed his disappointment at the criticism aimed at umpires, calling their job ‘incredibly difficult’.

“They have an incredibly difficult job,” he told 3AW on Wednesday.

“It’s really hard to get umpires at junior levels and there is a shortage of them around nationally in all the games.

“I am probably disappointed that it has become such a topic of discussion because it’s a very difficult job and the game has probably never been harder to umpire.”

The Freo senior coach admitted he recently broke his ‘golden rule’ of refraining to comment on umpiring.

He suggested during a media conference that umpires were reluctant to pay some free kicks this season.

“The Western Bulldogs game we had four free kicks for the day and it just probably surprised me a little bit,” he said.

“There’s been a couple of other games like that. (But) you are always going to get outliers against the average.”

He also made the ‘saddle’s back’ comment, in reference to what he thought were frees not being paid when players were jumping on other players’ backs.

“When I mentioned the ‘saddle’s back’, that was (from) watching a lot of games of footy, it was being let run a fair bit,” Lyon said. 

“I remember there was an incident in a Brisbane game where someone was actually really riding someone on the back and the bloke was hanging onto him.

“It was really a couple of extreme examples.”

Lyon said if he had any more queries about umpiring he wouldn’t be doing it in a public forum.

“We should be doing it behind closed doors and we should be doing it through the right channels,” he said.

“I’ve never criticised umpires for losing, because at the end of the day, if it’s that close, you’ve got plenty of other things.”