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That much-maligned body, the AFL Match Review Panel, this week deserves high praise for making a painful, but responsible, decision. Whatever you think of the quality of the judgement to suspend Patrick Dangerfield, you can’t fault its independence and integrity.
Decisions such as this have to be made without regard to extraneous consequences… like Brownlow Medal possibilities. That’s how the MRP acted.
It’s an important decision because it elevates and further restores confidence in the game’s judicial processes. I say ‘further’, because the sequence of events that led to Bachar Houli’s eventual four-week suspension from an incident in Round 14 was also a significant ‘tick’ for AFL justice.
The Dangerfield judgement, though, is arguably the bravest call by a judicial body – tribunal or MRP – since the 1960s. In those times, when commercial considerations weren’t a factor, there was no squeamishness at imposing a four-match ban which might cause a star player to miss an entire finals series.
In the most controversial case of its kind in football history, the legendary John Coleman was rubbed out on the eve of the 1951 finals: this despite the fact that he’d been provoked by Carlton hard-man, Harry Caspar.
Ron Barassi suffered a similar fate in 1963, receiving a four-week suspension for striking Richmond’s Roger Dean in Round 17. Demon fans believed Dean staged for a free, but it didn’t save their champion. Richmond’s Neville Crowe was another to be savagely dealt with by a 1960s tribunal, missing the ‘67 grand final after Carlton’s John Nicholls ‘milked’ an incident in the Second-Semi, leading to Crowe’s suspension.
Judgements were made back then free of fear or favour. There wasn’t big money in the game, so there was no motivation for commercial compromise. In fact, there was no room for anything other than impartial justice, for in those formative times sport reflected old-fashioned values and virtue.
Sadly, the quality of justice wasn’t always perfect, as, even when television coverage was available it was considered inadmissible at tribunal hearings.
The long and the short of Monday’s decision is that the suspension of Dangerfield is the less commercially attractive outcome for the AFL by a million miles. It has most likely turned a thrilling Brownlow Medal count into a one-horse race, with the resultant ramifications for footy’s night of nights and Channel Seven’s telecast.
Some might even consider it ridiculous that the game would allow its major social occasion to be diminished. Surely such a pragmatic view will never prevail, yet the era of sport-as-commercial-product is so powerful that not everyone continues to resist its tide.
For the rest of us, though, it’s imperative that sport and its administrators retain contact with their morally grounded past. For, if competitions like the AFL come to see themselves simply as purveyors of a product within a highly competitive market-place, one day the business of selling it will become more important than the product itself. And that’s the day a game would cease to be credible.
So, Monday was a big win for credibility. And it was overdue. For whether by sheer coincidence or not, over the past 15 years or so there have been many head-scratching decisions. I have to admit to being pleasantly surprised when I read the Match Review Panel’s decision on Monday.
Not that I, or anyone else, could feel other than sympathy for Patrick Dangerfield. A second straight Brownlow was a real possibility. He is a champion footballer, an engaging and intelligent young man, and that rare breed prepared to do things with a bit of individual flare.
Others might have a different view, but I thought his recent press conference with crutches and head-bandage was original and funny.
Nevertheless, Dangerfield tripped up last Saturday amid what some might call the red-tape now required to protect players within a potentially dangerous, contact game.
He held onto Matthew Kreuzer way too long for it to be ignored and this ensured he had to be held accountable for any injury sustained in ‘that’ tackle.
Players can be forgiven for being confused. On one hand, they’re being pushed by all around them to tackle hard and long; on the other hand, a player has just lost a shot at immortality for doing exactly that.
It’s time umpires learnt from the lesson imposed by the MRP, as too often they remain inclined to allow screamingly obvious breaches to go unpunished. It must be made clearer to players what they can and can’t do.