- Video
-
Club Roar
Captured a great grassroots sporting moment? We want to see it!Content Collections
The Roar Community
- Join
- Login
Lunging for head-high free kicks is becoming a blight on the AFL, and it is time for the league to take strong action.
Watch the tape, call the offenders out, and suspend them. Do it before we reach a crisis point.
Actions like these aren’t new, and it is churlish of me to present two specific examples highlighting two specific players (Brisbane’s Ben Keays and Sydney’s Tom Papley, respectively).
But these are two incidents that occurred on the weekend that highlight with great clarity an emerging pressure point in the league’s policy making.
I have a controversial opinion. The @AFLTribunal should start fining players for this sort of stuff #AFL pic.twitter.com/XnTeJLudLL
— Ryan Buckland (@RyanBuckland7) August 8, 2016
And this sort of stuff #AFL. Review the tape, call it out, fines to suspensions. Too many rookies are doing it pic.twitter.com/nQiuSVbBRZ
— Ryan Buckland (@RyanBuckland7) August 8, 2016
In the era of hyper-professionalism, clubs are searching for every scrap of advantage they can muster in the confines of the rules. Sometimes it leads to sparkling innovations, that change the game for the better (Hawthorn’s penchant for precision kicking, the shotgun blast stylings of Adelaide and Greater Wesetrn Sydney).
This year, we’ve seen the ugly side of tactical innovation.
Players across the AFL are electing to search for free kicks, rather than open space or their teammates.
The issue has come to a head (sorry) twice this year, with expert proponent Lindsay Thomas at the centre of things on both occasions.
First came the Round 10 Friday night game, where he drew what felt like 19 free kicks for head high contact – a couple leading directly to goals. A few weeks later came Bias-gate (it’s not a controversy if it’s not a –gate), where North Melbourne coach Brad Scott received what turned out to be garbage information that an umpire had said Thomas wasn’t being paid free kicks because he was a ducker. That was a fun 12 hours.
It is grossly unfair to single out Thomas. The fact of the matter is many players do what he does – he just does it well.
Data on this issue doesn’t exist in the public domain, but I’m positive the AFL collects data on the types of free kicks that are being paid. The vibe is that there are an increasing number of drawn head-high free kicks being paid, and of most concern is that it is the youngest players that are turning to the tactic.
The league’s current tackling rules create an incentive for players to ‘draw’ high contact. Over time, more and more players are exploiting this incentive to great effect. Indeed, to return to the epicentre of this issue for a moment, Scott conceded that his coaching staff train their players to draw free kicks.
We know the actions. Players draw head-high free kicks by dropping their knees anticipating contact, forcing the tackler’s arms high with their free arm, or lowering their centre of gravity and moving towards the tackler.
The laws of the game put the onus on the tackler to ‘tackle correctly’. Rule 15.4 governs permitted and prohibited physical contact. Sub-rule 15.4.1 states that a correct tackle is one where the tackler makes contact to a player below the shoulders and above the knees. Rule 15.4.5 states that a free kick is payable under 15 specific circumstances, one of which is if a tackler makes contact with an opposition player above the shoulders or below the knees in a manner likely to cause injury.
That’s interesting in itself: by the letter of the law, a tackler must make high contact that is likely to cause injury. That’s a Pandora’s Box we’ll keep closed for now.
It sounds simple: a tackler has to ensure their tackle is directed as their opponent’s mid-section, and there should be little-to-no chance of unintentional high contact occurring.
But that is not the circumstances we’re talking about now. The correct tackle rule assumes a player will be seeking to evade. By lunging towards their opponent, the play does not unfold in the way that the rules are designed.
The ball carriers that are moving themselves low, or are deliberately undertaking actions to make their opponent’s tackle slip high, in an effort to draw contact. It makes the rule as it is currently defined redundant in these situations. The great irony of this, of course, is that the rule exists to protect players from being hit in the head.
The league is at a point where it must make a decision. The rules, as they currently exist, are creating a perverse outcome that is not only against the ethereal ‘spirit of the game’, it is against the AFL’s newfound mandate to protect its players from long-term health issues associated with head and neck injuries.
As judge, jury and executioner when it comes to the league’s justice system, only they have the power to change the course of things.
Well, what’s the workable solution, I hear you hyperventilate? Ban all physical contact? Consider ducking an action that exhausts prior opportunity and pay holding the ball? Expect the umpires to make snap decisions about what is genuine head high contact and what is drawn? None of these are either workable or solutions.
AFL umpires already have one of the most difficult officiating tasks going around. This is not an issue that is as black and white as it seems on face value, because in the moment, from a first person view, it is extremely difficult to determine how genuine high contact is. Indeed, players exaggerate contact in order to draw the umpires’ attention.
Creating a new rule, as is the world’s solution to most vexing problems these days, isn’t going to fix this. Nor is changing the rules, period. There might be ways that change the incentives on paper, but short of allowing high contact, none of them will prove effective in practise: ‘the head’ is king, and this hierarchy will only become further entrenched in the future.
Instead, the league should defer the responsibility for stamping out this practise to the judicial arm of their legal system. The match review panel (MRP) should, as a matter of course when it reviews game footage, seek out examples of where players blatantly draw head-high contact, and cite the players responsible.
There is already a ‘staging’ category in the MRP’s guidelines that references conduct that affects umpires’ decision-making and/or is unsportsmanlike. The penalty for doing so is a written warning, followed by a $1500 fine for a second offence, and a $2500 for third and subsequent offences.
Drawing head-high contact doesn’t neatly fit those criteria – the ‘vibe’ is that it is unsportsmanlike, and that it affects umpires’ decision-making. Instead, a new class of offence should be created that explicitly calls out the actions we all know contribute to drawn head-high free kicks, and the penalties should be scaled in the same way that classifiable offences like striking and charging.
Begin with a $1500 fine – which by definition would include a name and shame – and scale up to a one-match suspension for second and subsequent offences. After two years, the threat of a suspension fades, just like the threat of bad behaviour loading disappears in the classifiable offences system.
Players, and their clubs, must receive a penalty that will hit them hard. That is the only way that this behaviour will stop.
There are complications, and there is no doubt bans would be challenged given the inherent subjectivity in the league’s judicial system. But these are no more significant than the current classifiable offence, where the MRP and tribunal are asked to judge the difference between an action being careless and intentional.
It sounds severe, and in many ways it is. But when you consider the potential severity of this end game – a growing tidal wave of players dropping at their knees and exaggerating contact, and an increased chance of serious, life-altering injury – a harsh approach like this is the most palatable course of action.