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Originally Posted by Ethulin
If they meant blatant they would have said blatant. The reason they did not is because one man's blatant is another's covert.
As a soccer referee we get into situations far more outlandish than this and do not disregard them as "outlandish" but we apply the rules and find the correct course of action.
In soccer we have things called "FIFA clarifications" similar to what FIRST has just for these kind of situations, but nothing is just disregarded for being improbable or unlikely.
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FIRST has told us to take what the rules say at face value--ie: don't become lawyers. It seems like the intent of the rule is fairly clear.
As for the exact situation you describe, everytime I've seen a robot get flipped, the opponent ends up cheering and the flipped team stops cheering. I don't see how this could possibly be interpreted as violating the spirirt of the rule. The odds of this ever occurring are so low as to be a non factor. In fact, it's probably never happened once since 1992.
Speaking from experience in last years game (which was probably one of the hardest ever to ref), referees have
way too much to deal with already to add something as subjective as interpreting crowd noise as being unfairly advantageous to a team in such a situation.
If every rule contained verbiage to cover every single situation that may or may not come up, there would be multiple phone book sized volumes. Instead we just refer to situations using the basic guidelines given, and common sense.
$0.02