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Joined January 2016
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Allistar Twigg heads the Snedden Hall & Gallop Sports Law team. He provides advice on legal, administration and governance issues which are uniquely sporting related.
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The NRL recently imposed significant fines on three separate NRL clubs who, it said, had breached the game's head injury rules in Round 3.…
Does the finding of guilt of the 34 Essendon players by the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) mean that they are forever drug…
Thanks for your comments, Wilson.
I agree that the full proceedings could be quite lengthy — possibly years, not months. The length of legal proceedings depends on so many factors, including the attitudes of the parties and the needs of the court to deliver true justice to all the parties, including the individual players.
However, should the players choose to go down this path (and I would suspect their lawyers have already spoken to them about this), they have the opportunity, should they satisfy certain legal prerequisites, to obtain an interim injunction to prevent the AFL from implementing the CAS bans until after the proceedings have been finally decided. And the time frame for granting an interim injunction is usually weeks not months.
The Essendon 34: Can CAS’s decision be appealed?
Hi Zedman, that is true — once the doctor knows a head knock has occurred, they have access to their own video replay technology on the sideline to enable review and assessment of the incident. But the point of the article is that there is no certainty that the trainer and/or the doctor will actually find out about possible head knocks before the match is over, and that this is a gap in the concussion protocols which has consequences for the duties of care which the NRL and the clubs owe to the players. At the moment, the concussion guidelines don’t provide for and don’t make it anyone’s responsibility to let the first assessor (the trainer) and the second assessor (the club doctor) know of a head knock. The NRL and clubs should move to close this gap.
Were the NRL's $350,000 concussion fines fair?