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Let’s imagine you’re jogging in the park, enjoying the scenery. All of a sudden someone in a balaclava rushes out of the bushes and lunges at you, grabbing your arms somewhere north of your elbows.
Thankfully, you probably don’t even need to think in this scenario.
Your instinct kicks in. You raise your arms at the shoulders while lowering your centre of gravity and the perpetrator’s grip slips off. His momentum takes him in his direction and you continue in yours, albeit quite a bit faster.
Now apply this to footy. What is it that Alastair Clarkson expects of an opposition player when a Hawthorn player tackles? Meekly comply with an ineffective tackling technique that instinct alone should help the tackled player avoid?
It is Clarkson’s prerogative to try and talk his way into fewer free kicks paid against his team without addressing the way his team actually play the game. But really, we see plenty of good, effective tackles week-in, week-out that do not slip high.
If the tackling player is positioned well enough to deserve to win the contest, the tackler’s arms will be tight and low, either around the hips or around the arms at the elbow, all with a downward force.
What we saw with the Hawks on the weekend were players who were not positioned well enough to apply an effective tackle, whose momentum went sideways or was over-committed, and whose grip was on the upper arm or shoulder.
The natural way to slip this sort of tackle, in footy or in self defence, is to shrug the shoulders: that is to raise the arms to the horizontal so that there is no longer anything for the tackler with momentum to grip. At that point, the tackler has two options to stay within the laws of the game. Either release the tackle or re-grip it legally.
The split-second choice of the Hawks’ player seems to be to complete the tackle to the ground with full grip around the neck to ensure the opposition player doesn’t get away from him.
The best advice for Clarkson and the Hawks is to tackle the opposition mid-section. If you can’t, and you feel your grip slip, take the jumper instead on the way through.
You can’t expect the umpires to come to your aid when you neither have the ball, nor are in good enough position to stick an effective tackle. If you take a man around the neck to prevent him going past you, consider it a professional free kick.
Don’t translate your frustrations into more rule changes that will see players coming off the field with AFL-sanctioned scratches over their necks and faces for the trouble of an instinctive shrug.
Imagine the potential injury and legal problems for the AFL if suddenly a player can, within the rules, slap a sweaty hand onto an equally sweaty shoulder and not be bound by a duty to care about where the hand goes next. “Sorry about your eyeball son, but he slapped your shoulder on the way through first, so what do you want? We’ve made that legal now.”
The choice for Alastair Clarkson and the Hawks really is this: continue to tackle recklessly from a position of disadvantage and cop the free against, or study the best tacklers in the league and work out how it should be done. We don’t need less care for players’ heads in AFL footy.
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