AFL football operations boss Mark Evans wants ongoing debate over the match review panel (MRP) put on hold until the end of the season.
Evans last week briefed club chief executives over potential changes to the league’s judicial system, floating the prospect of carry-over points being reformed and fines replacing bans for lower-level offences.
The commission will need to approve any adjustments to the status quo and that won’t happen mid-season.
With seven weeks to run until the grand final, there’s likely to be no shortage of hard-luck stories among charged players who feel they would have avoided suspensions under the new system.
Starting with Hawthorn key forward Jarryd Roughead, whose carry-over points put him at risk of missing Sunday’s clash with Fremantle due to suspension.
“Can you activate it this week, get Roughy off?,” Hawks coach Alastair Clarkson joked on Monday when sitting alongside Evans at the launch of an anti-smoking campaign backed by the AFL Coaches Association.
Evans said MRP changes weren’t a fait accompli, and that any conjecture was unfair given the new model hadn’t been fully detailed yet.
“It’ll be difficult for people to make an assessment of the system until we’re ready to reveal it,” Evans said.
“This is for debate at the end of the year.
“The system that is in place for 2014 stays in place all the way through the season.”
Fremantle gun Nathan Fyfe’s two-week suspension for an accidental head-high bump has been highlighted by many pundits as one of the MRP’s most glaring failures this season.
Evans suggested it was unlikely the new set of rules would have saved Fyfe.
“For head-high contact incidents, I think they’re always going to come under scrutiny in whatever system you have,” he said.
“(The changes look at) the very low end of the grading scale, and how the match review panel goes about grading an incident to come up with a set number of weeks.
“It looks at when you would then refer that onto the tribunal.”
And there are no plans for Brownlow medal eligibility rules to be looked at, despite recent rancour that has coincided with Fyfe’s sparkling form.
“I can’t imagine that changing,” Evans said.
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