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Halfway through December 2017 in the lead up to the ancient pagan Roman festival we now call Christmas, we learned that in 2018 the AFL would introduce a one-man match review panel.
While the MRP clearly needed fixing, the major solution put in place by new AFL general manager of football operations Steven Hocking – appointing Michael Christian to the role of sole AFL MRP panel member and boss (but ultimately making himself the final word on all player penalties handed down by the MRP) – strikes me as one made by a man either completely enraptured with the corporate autocracy he experienced under Brian Cook at Geelong or incredibly ignorant of the lessons of history.
I tend to think it was the latter which drove Hocking toward his solution to the MRP’s woes.
On December 8, 2017 Cook was quoted on the radio saying ‘“I’d like a simple system where the MRP is one person…They make the judgment, they look at it and say that’s what this person gets. I think you’ll get much more consistency.”
Amazingly, one week later, hey presto! Hocking announces the same thing.
The new set up of the MRP was constructed under the premise that it needed more consistency. Indeed the new system has some good points like doing away with players risking an extra week when appealing a decision and a few other little improvements around extra player fines instead of weeks off, and so on.
The obvious flaw in the plan, however, is that putting so much power in the hands of a few scarcely leads to order and consistency especially when applying rules – as the great intellectual Christopher Hitchens once said about the concentration of power, “The true essence… is in fact not its regularity but its unpredictability and caprice; those who live under it must never be able to relax, must never be quite sure if they have followed the rules correctly or not.”
Having a system ruled over by one man immediately puts that system and the penalties within it totally at the behest of that man’s emotions, inherent and subconscious biases and natural human inconsistencies.
Hocking has said of his role in the new system “Am I going to interfere? It’s not my style … I’m there to support him.” This then cedes much power to Christian with little interference from his overlord.
(Photo by Scott Barbour/AFL Media/Getty Images)
This strange new set up has also placed Christian (who I presume will be handling the media side of things) under an unnecessary amount of extra pressure handling the totality of the media and publics inevitable disdain following certain decisions.
Then there’s always the old ‘absolute power corrupts absolutely’ problem to also worry about.
The MRP could be set up better with four people. Three independently review incidents in separate soundproof booths eliminating discussion between them as they decide. They do this every night after games (hopefully limiting the impact of trial by media) and lock in their intent, impact, force and points decisions.
The fourth official independently oversees the process and makes the final decision alone. When the results come back differently the fourth official simply melds the two judges’ results that were most closely aligned with his majority rules criteria for the final decision.
The results of all three judges and the final decision are released to the public to keep accountability in the process.
Where the old system went wrong was that there was too much discussion between MRP members going on, which clouded the issue and made a final outcome far more complex than it had to be.
The mistake Hocking has made is assuming the MRP failed in the past because there were a number of people involved in the process, rather it was how those people interacted that was the problem.
The new MRP system may work well at first but it will unravel and when it does like history has taught us time and again it will be a quick and chaotic fall from grace.
In the lead up to Christmas last year it must’ve come as some relief for Hocking having finally sorted out the MRP’s issues, but he needn’t have looked farther than the failed empire from which the former pagan celebration derives its origins to understand that appointing a single person to control anything, particularly the governance of penalties for breaking rules, is a very very bad idea.
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