“If we keep going at this rate, there’ll be no tackling by the end of 2024-25”, Brian Taylor squawked on Friday night. “When you play this game, surely you sign up for a dangerous game. You’re not a tiler, laying tiles in a safe environment. It is a dangerous, physically brutal, one-on-one sport, and that is the most appealing thing about it.” “I give up on that one,” Matthew Richardson said. “I’ve just got no idea,” Luke Hodge added.
It was in response to Jarrod Berry being reported for dangerous tackling, which was swiftly and predictably thrown out. It was a neat snapshot of what passes for football commentary on Channel 7. It was a conversation we hear in lounge rooms, in grandstands, on footy panel shows, and in cyberspace. “That’s another one!” Anthony Hudson cried after Lachie Whitfield’s tackle on Jordan Clark the following day. It’s a staple of watching the football now – Is player X in trouble for this tackle? Football’s stuffed! It’s soft!
“Change ain’t looking for friends,” Al Swearengen says in Deadwood. “Change calls the tune we all dance to.” Football is changing. Following Jordan De Goey’s tackle on Lloyd Meek in the pre-season (which earned him a $3,000 fine), there’s been a major shift in how dangerous tackles are graded. Since then, there’s been 21 suspensions. The crackdown may well be the biggest, most sudden, least understood and inadequately explained change in the history of the sport. The most contentious was the three-match suspension handed out to James Sicily, which goes to the AFL Appeals Board this afternoon. It’s drawn the ire of everyone from former state premiers to the league website’s completely nonsensical ‘Sliding Doors’ column.
When you’re running a sporting organisation, you need to explain rapid change. You need to justify it. The AFL is hardly an organisation that’s shy about scheduling a press conference, championing a cause, or firing out a media release. But so far, we’ve heard next to nothing. The outgoing CEO recently flew to Paris, where he was a groomsman for celebrity chef Guillaume Brahimi, who married a chicken heiress. Old mucker Lachlan Murdoch was also in the wedding party, and a jolly old time was presumably had by all.
But we haven’t heard anything substantial from anyone at headquarters. The task would normally fall to the Head of Football. But that role has been vacant for nearly nine months. Laura Kane stepped into an interim role, but has barely been heard from. The AFL sent out some videos last week, outlining what constitutes a dangerous tackle. But many of the senior players, captains and coaches haven’t watched it. Toby Greene, a club captain whose entire career has straddled the line of acceptability, said he was too busy binge-watching Queen of the South to bother.
In the absence of anyone actually taking charge and explaining this, the vacuum is filed by a self-selecting cast who are often completely ill-equipped for the task. They have the loudest voices and the biggest platforms. They’re often unable, or unwilling, to grasp the different roles the MRO, the tribunal, and the Appeals Board play. They’re often former champions, hard men reluctant to change, men who are paid to have a strong opinion, but who are not always renowned for their legal expertise, nuance and willingness to change their views.
The rest of us are learning on the run. We had several years of incremental change to shift our mindset around dangerous bumps. We’re at the point now where most of us can look at a bump like De Goey’s against West Coast, and instantly know it’s outside the rules. Just a few years ago, we would have bemoaned a world gone mad.
But the parameters around dangerous tackling have shifted far more abruptly, and have caused greater confusion. The flinch reaction, when James Sicily cops three weeks for his tackle and Kozzy Pickett escapes with two for his frontal assault in round one, is that something is fundamentally broken. But by the letter of the tribunal guidelines, it makes perfect sense. It’s challenging for all of us. It goes to the core of the game and what we teach at Auskick clinics. It goes to what we value in footballers and how footballers are coached.
At the moment, the narrative is driven by crack King’s Counsels, who are making an absolute killing, and a couple of tribunal reporters who should get AFLMA awards for their ability to distil complex legal arguments. The rest is left to the outrage industry, which spends its weeks freeze framing, gazing misty eyed to the past, and completely misunderstanding the basic concept of jurisprudence. The AFL needs to lead on this. It needs to take ownership. At the very least, it needs to explain why it has cracked down, and what its end game is.
