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Grundy decision little more than public relations

(AAP Image/Julian Smith)
Roar Guru
7th August, 2017
23

The head is sacrosanct. How many times must we hear this flimsy and contradictory defence of the decision-making process and verbiage within the AFL and Match Review Panel?

By now, you’re aware Brodie Grundy has been offered two weeks by the MRP for his textbook tackle on Ben Brown that unfortunately resulted in a concussion for the North Melbourne big man.

Grundy was deemed to have engaged in “rough” and “careless” contact for his involvement in a tackle that was deemed of such high quality (ie; dispossess player with the ball) that he was awarded a free kick.

The paradox of a free kick also being an offence worthy of suspension is baffling but enough has been made about that issue so I won’t touch on it.

As for the tackle itself, we must first clarify what the term “head first” means as I heard that bandied around quite a bit for those in favour of the suspension.

(And bear with me as there will be some pro wrestling references here.)

Head-first should be as it sounds, the first thing to make contact with the ground is the head, simple right?

For something to be head first in needs to be in the realm of a good ole’ fashion Jake The Snake Roberts DDT or Diamond Dallas Page Diamond Cutter (better than the RKO in my humble opinion).

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Brodie Grundy of the Magpies (left) and Matthew Boyd of the Bulldogs contest

(AAP Image/Julian Smith)

In regards to the tackle, both of Ben Brown’s knees, his left shoulder and right palm hit the ground before his head. Given that three different parts of his body hit the ground first it’s incorrect to imply he was driven ‘head first’.

Now by no means am I placing blame on Brown for the concussion, but that is part of the issue the AFL/MRP fail to understand. Sometimes, there is no fault.

I know it’s hard for industry types to believe – given their over-reliance in the power of the pen, legislature and god forbid “rules of the game” amendments – but sometimes there are parts of our great game that occur that we wish wouldn’t.

Where it gets confusing is when the rules are muddled and made almost indecipherable in the name of ‘player safety’.

The AFL is the first to toot its own horn about owning the fastest and most exciting brand of football in the world, but once it suits them they’d prefer to break it down into angles, movements, motions (whether one or two) and then hold it against the player despite the fact the game moves at supersonic speed.

This approach is partially used to further reiterate that players have a ‘duty of care’ for one another.

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This duty of care concept as a whole is strange notion.

First of all, as a football player your duty of care is to your teammates, coaches, and club as at the end of the day everyone’s livelihood, whether it be the footy department, community engagement, membership or the top brass is dependent on on-field success.

That should be the players first duty of care, making sure a football is wrapped up tightly, the arms are pinned, and someone like Ben Brown is taken to ground as a man of his hulking stature sure as hell isn’t going to go down without a fight.

The duty of care of a footy player should simply be not to act like drop-kick (see: Toby Greene) and not engage in non-football acts.

I’m all for the AFL cracking down on gut shots and jumper punches as at their core, they have nothing to with football. You can’t win a free by jumper punching someone so hard the umpire has no choice but to simply applaud, whistle and have you go on your merry way.

Another issue with the duty of care reasoning is that it’s purely reactionary. If Ben Brown doesn’t suffer a concussion, the Grundy tackle is merely a footnote a Collingwood winning highlights package. Nothing has changed in the act except the outcome.

By this logic, why don’t players have a duty of care if a player injures themselves in other tackling attempts? Suppose a ball carrier is tackled to the ground and fractures his collarbone or suffers a high ankle sprain due to being landed on. Surely the impetus lies on the tackler to do everything in their power to not take them to ground in the first place, thus avoiding the situation all together?

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Of course not, that would be ludicrous.

The standard response here would be “well the head is obviously different to an ankle, ever heard of a thing called concussions, have you read League of Denial or seen that underwhelming Will Smith movie?”

Yes, concussions and the resulting effects of CTE on certain individuals has been monstrous. But let’s not act as if the AFL is truly doing everything in its power to protect the head.

I mean, hell, in the past five years we’ve seen 140 years of ‘protect the ball carrier’ undermined by the sliding in rule protecting the shins rather than the head.

And when pundits scream about protecting defenceless players there’s never one mention to the most defenceless players of all.

Those taking a knee to the back of the head for the sake of the ever-amazing “Jesaulenko-You-Beauty” or “Howwweee-Did-He-Do-It” moment.

Why don’t we outlaw leaping onto defenceless players’ shoulders to protect their head? For the simple reason as the screamer is a good look for the game, the current soft – dare I say, sawft – climate of the AFL these days’ means tackling is not.

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Which makes the Brodie Grundy decision just as much about public relations as it does football.

It’s sad because tackling once was/still is a great part of our game yet it looks as if the AFL would rather it resemble two shoppers shamelessly scrapping over the last “better than a Dyson $89 dollar vacuum cleaner” at K-Mart.

And as sure as I am that Digby Morrell has the greatest name in the history of footy; that definitely won’t be a good look for the game.

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