It was the most sickening sight on a football field this year. In the first quarter of the Geelong-Richmond AFL match at the Melbourne Cricket Ground last Saturday, Cats defender Tom Stewart ironed out Tigers on-baller Dion Prestia – who was several metres from the ball, which he had just leapt in the air to tap to a teammate – with what is daintily known, in Australian football, as a bump.
Anywhere else you would call it an assault. Even ‘shoulder charge to the head’ is manifestly inadequate. Prestia crawled in circles, his face showing not even so much as a vacant look, before medical staff arrived. The awful spectacle brought a lump to the throat and, without doubt, a dent to next year’s junior participation numbers.
What happened next, and since, became one of those moments that show what different paths the football codes have taken on how they look after their players.
Had this attack taken place in a rugby union match at any time in the past decade, Stewart would have been sent off then suspended for several months, no questions asked. With law students on the field, lawyers off it, insurance people everywhere and a concussion class action on its tail, rugby has streaked forward on concussion. Some complain of over-officiousness ruining the entertainment. Over-officiousness of multiple kinds ruins the entertainment every week, but on concussion, rugby has to be credited for taking action, of which send-offs have been a vital and behaviour-changing component.
Had it been rugby league, Stewart would also have been sent off. TV commentators might have whinged about it spoiling the match. But come on, enough’s enough. You just can’t allow shoulder charges to the head, coming from the blindside of a player who is intent on the ball.
The AFL, meanwhile, in its hermit kingdom with its own self-creating culture and standards, goes its own way. This certainty about its values makes it such a strong tribal code and, for fans, of which I am one, compulsive viewing. But on matters like this, its hermetic existence has stranded it in the lee of a fast-moving world.
Geelong star Tom Stewart.Credit:AFL Photos
What happened at the MCG after Prestia was hit? The show went on. The ball was kicked over him even as he failed to differentiate his ankle from next Tuesday. The ball was kicked over him while the doctors settled him down. It was kicked past him as they helped him off.
What happened to Stewart? He didn’t get sent off, because in the AFL there are no send-offs. He looked so upset that the commentators soon portrayed him as a kind of secondary victim: gee, he felt bad, you had to feel really sorry for the guy, though it didn’t affect him so much that he wasn’t one of the best players on the field. He phoned Prestia later to apologise. He expressed contrition at the AFL tribunal. He was suspended for four weeks, which in any other universe is a stroke with a feather-duster, but in the AFL was considered harsh. Debate over send-offs sparked up, but only briefly before the AFL brushed it aside. For a still-ruling majority, send-offs would be an affront to the game’s dignity, purposeless alarmism, and, worst of all, the kind of thing they do in ‘rugby’.
It’s worth looking at how the send-off rule has evolved in the rugby codes. In olden times, when violent and dirty play was both planned and relished, send-offs were reserved for the brutal excesses of what everyone was doing anyway: punches to the head were de rigueur, but blatant ones in the open could get you sent off. Coathangers and spear tackles were tolerated, except for really bad ones. ‘Intent’ wasn’t so much an issue because violent intentions were everywhere. The send-off was for intention plus what you might call criminality.
One of the worst incidents was Les Boyd’s cocked elbow to Darryl Brohman’s head in the 1983 Origin series, earning Brohman a season-ending broken jaw and Boyd a 12-month ban. Even then, Boyd wasn’t actually sent off because, um, that’s Origin? It all happened too quickly and making such a big call places too much pressure on officials, in the spur of the moment, to get it right. It was a stupid rationale in 1983 (as indicated by the length of Boyd’s ban) and to think that the AFL’s anti-send-off lobby still maintains it in 2022 makes you wonder which code is more populated by the dazed and the confused.
The rugby codes have changed, and intentional thuggery is now rare. There is intentional niggle and skulduggery, which are punished with sin-binning under the rubric of ‘professional fouls’, like that which caused controversy in Sunday’s second Origin match. Send-offs are now reserved for accidents: high tackles and spear tackles for which the player is usually apologising to his opponent before the referee has even got to him. In union, the red card is used in a sometimes frustratingly cut-and-dried manner for hits to the head. But at least players know where they stand, when the other fellow is lying on the ground. You hit someone in the head? You are letting your team down, and the fear of getting sent off is the strongest imaginable deterrent. Send-offs, as annoying as they are, really have brought positive behavioural change.
And yet the AFL – some 33 years after one of the most cynical acts of wanton violence seen in any sport, when Geelong’s Mark Yeates sprinted across the field with the sole intention of hitting Hawthorn’s Dermott Brereton hard enough to break his ribs and rupture his kidney in the first seconds of the 1989 grand final – is still caught up in debates about whether send-offs would detract from the entertainment.
How would it operate? Would the sent-off player’s team only have 17 players on the field, or could they still have 18 but draw on only three, instead of four, interchanges? Would the threat of a send-off have been a deterrent to Tom Stewart, causing him to think twice in the seconds he had to change direction after Prestia disposed of the ball (hint: yes)? Would the fabric of the game be harmed – the oft-heard moan of ‘touch football’ – if a player who used their shoulder to knock an opponent into next week was, gasp, given an early shower?
While Nero fiddles, Rome burns. The AFL has as big a concussion problem as the other codes. There were at least 76 concussions during the last season, and games lost due to concussion protocols trebled between 2020 and 2021. The AFL does treat concussions seriously – after they have happened. In the future, it will treat concussions more seriously still – after it is brought to face the same existential threat that is rumbling down the road towards the other codes.
Oh, a person from a rugby state would support a send-off rule (but it works, and has always worked; it changes behaviour).
Would a send-off rule lead to one fewer concussions than we see now? We don’t know, but, as the rugby codes have found, the point is what value these sports place on their players’ brains, when weighed against ‘the entertainment’. What is a player’s life worth when it is placed on the scales against that sacred shroud, the ‘fabric of the game’?
During Stewart’s hearing this week, the chairman of the AFL tribunal, Jeff Gleeson, SC, said the Geelong player ‘breached his duty of care by a considerable margin’. You have to chuckle at the idea of coaches addressing their team before a match: ‘Go in hard, and MAKE SURE YOU DO NOT BREACH YOUR DUTY OF CARE!’
There is a duty of care being breached on a much wider scale, and it is not Tom Stewart who is breaching it. The world will not end if the AFL instigates a send-off rule. But the world may end, sooner than anyone thinks, if it does not.
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