According to Match Review Panel chairman, Mark Fraser, Essendon’s Leroy Jetta behaved in an unsportsmanlike manner which could have triggered a melee by falling to the ground feigning a blow to the face and a staging charge was therefore appropriate. Fraser admitted there was a slight contact to Jetta.

A week earlier, the Saints’ Brendon Goddard also fell to the ground after feigning a blow to the head. The MRP found that Goddard’s exaggeration of contact didn’t cross the threshold of unsportsmanlike conduct. The saving grace for Goddard appeared to be that Mitch Robinson had gripped his guernsey and was pulling it down. What’s missing is that Goddard was already exaggerating the head contact before whatever tiny force Robinson applied assisted Goddard groundwards.

Sorry, Mr Chairman, but was Goddard’s action any less likely to incite a melee than Jetta’s? No. Was there contact in both instances? By your own admission, yes. So, where does such a different result come from? Was Goddard’s action any more sportsmanlike than Jetta’s? A resounding No! But we get a different result. Why?

At its commencement, a Match Review Panel with a codified table for assessment of severity, impact and intent seemed like a perfectly reasonable idea. OK, it didn’t, but we could see where the thinking was coming from — remove seemingly capricious judgement calls and provide a greater degree of consistency.

And what have we seen from the MRP over five or so years? Seemingly capricious judgement calls and a decided lack of discernable consistency.

This Match Review Panel is the one the Monty Python team might have dreamt up. But then they would have thrown the idea out because it was too far-fetched. . .

Watching the Barcodes scrape home against the inaccurate Cats last night, we were struck by the number of times the Seven cameras lingered on foul-mouthed knuckle-draggers hurling invective at some invisible target. Lip reading isn’t difficult.

The AFL is constantly telling us that they want to make the game more family friendly, yet the broadcaster gives these moronic clods a few short moments of notoriety. The last thing most families — no, make that most footy fans — want is to have to suffer the sort of language that would be more at home in a logging camp or on the docks.

Lest anyone think AussieRulesBlog is a wowser, let us assure you that we enjoy a bit of ‘cussin’ as much as anyone. But there’s a time and place for it.

If we want families to attend and enjoy football — and that is surely the future of our game — surely it is the responsibility of the broadcaster not to provide gratification to these neanderthals? We want to discourage bad behaviour rather than reward it.

Zero tolerance is the modern AFL’s preferred response to a crisis. Zero tolerance of racism. Zero tolerance of high tackles. Zero tolerance of hands in the back. Zero tolerance of sling tackles. Ad infinitum.

The problem with the zero tolerance approach is that it removes context and nuance from the decision equation. In a zero tolerance world, the Lindsay Thomas–Gary Rohan incident is superficially similar to the Goodes slide tackle and so must be stamped out. Except that on closer inspection it’s not similar at all. The context, intent and subtle nuances of Thomas’ actions are quite different to Goodes’.

It doesn’t seem that long ago that the AFL’s umpiring department declared a sort of total war of players maintaining a tackle after an opponent had disposed of the ball. Such was the zero tolerance approach of the umpires that whistles were on a hair trigger. Not being able to see that the ball had been released was simply no defence. “We WILL stamp out players holding opponents after they’ve disposed of the ball!”

And so, for a time, there were a rash of absolutely unfair free kicks paid against players who had no chance of knowing that the player they’d tackled no longer had the ball.

Fast forward to rounds seven and eight of the 2012 season from those far off days of zero tolerance and you’d think you are in a time warp. Players are routinely tackled to the ground well after disposing of the ball and the umpires’ reaction is . . . indifference.

AussieRulesBlog has long espoused the view that the rules should be interpreted the same way in the grand Final as in round one of pre-season. We’ll go further. The interpretation should be the same from season to season unless there’s a compelling reason to change it.

Where have these huge swings in interpretation come from? Zero tolerance. If you swing wildly in one direction, karma has a way of evening up by swinging you equally as far in the other direction. Zero tolerance to indifference — racism being the welcome exception.

Wouldn’t it be nice to come to a new season knowing that the umpires would apply the same interpretation of the rules that we’d been used to for years? Even if it were only two years?

Isaac Newton said it best. For every action, there’s and equal and opposite reaction. Until there’s a moderate and considered approach to these issues that crop up from time to time, we’re fated to suffer lurches in the opposite direction.

Most will recall the announcement from the AFL that “the head is sacrosanct” — another in the line of zero-tolerance responses that to some degree failed because they didn’t acknowledge circumstance, nuance and context.

This week there was the first explicit acknowledgement that AussieRulesBlog can recall that the zero-tolerance approach to high contact was a mistake. Jeff Gieschen tells the Your Call segment on the AFL website that Cyril Rioli running head-first into a stationary Dean Polo should not have drawn a free kick for high contact.

Conditioned by the AFL’s track record, in the wake of the Adam Goodes slide tackle and suspension, nearly everyone piled into Lindsay Thomas over the incident in which Gary Rohan’s leg was broken. Any more than a cursory glance was sufficient to realise that Thomas’ actions were quite different to Goodes, but the community expected a zero-tolerance response.

The AFL today clarified its approach to slide tackles, putting the onus back on the sliding player to exercise a duty of care toward other players on the field.

“It is not illegal to slide to contest the ball, but players must be aware of the potential for injury if they slide into an opponent’s knees or ankles,” said Adrian Anderson.

It’s about time that some room for nuance and judgement was allowed. Zero tolerance works just fine — just as long as every incident is exactly the same. Introduce just one variation and the zero tolerance approach doesn’t cut it.

Here we are, approaching Round 6. We have an eighteen-team competition staged over twenty-four weeks. And eighteen — OK, for the purists, seventeen — doesn’t go into twenty-four.

Yes folks, it’s now official. The AFL’s fixture is unbalanced and some come out of it better than others. Alistair Clarkson has confirmed our worst fears — the Hawks have had a really tough start to the year and will end up having played lots of good teams twice.

And in other surprise news, cosmologists have forecast that the sun will rise in the east tomorrow, the Pope is allegedly a Catholic, and West Coast and Freo have to travel across the Nullabor roughly twice each fortnight (there and back).

The Age’s Jon Pierik, having nothing better to write, tells us that the poor old Tigers have had a tough run too.

We could have a fairer home and away season. Revive the ‘Roys, relocate the Swans back to South and cut those silly interstate expansion teams loose. Then, with only twelve teams, we could play each other twice — home and away! — in a twenty-two week season.

There is much about that old suburban VFL that AussieRulesBlog loved, but by and large the expanded AFL has been good for the game and good for spectators — aside from Ned Kelly running the catering concessions.

Interestingly, it used to be thought back in the VFL days that the Cats had an advantage because they travelled up to Melbourne every second week! So, you Eagles! Stick that in your pipes and smoke it!  ;-)

Can we just get over this nonsense quickly?

Tomorrow morning’s meeting between Vlad and Adrian Anderson should be stirring stuff. AussieRulesBlog is rather glad we’re not in Anderson’s shoes.

In recent weeks, the hue and cry over the deficiencies of his much-vaunted goal line decision video referral ‘system’ has risen in a crescendo. It’s not that a few times it has actually worked: it’s more that the holes in the process make a Swiss cheese look solid.

Now, that other video obsession of the AFL’s football operations boss, the Match Review Panel, has been shown to be guessing when it charged the Saints’ Leigh Montagna with striking based on a review of game video footage.

“The MRP charged Montagna based on video footage, although the point at which Magner's eye was cut was inconclusive.”

It’s interesting that an inconclusive ‘goal line’ video apparently automatically reduces the score to the lesser option, but an inconclusive video at the MRP results in a charge and a penalty. That’s consistency for you, just like we get from the umpires week to week, quarter to quarter and decision to decision.

Still, we shouldn’t be surprised. It’s pretty clear from watching games that the AFL umpiring department is quite happy to have their field umpires guessing, so why should the MRP miss out on the fun?

Confidence in the video referral ‘system’ and the MRP is at just about rock bottom.

Here’s an idea, Vlad! If we have to have  video referrals and reviews, let’s base our decisions — goal line and Match review charges — on what we can actually see.