In the first part of AussieRulesBlog’s look at Match Review Panel assessments, we focused on the two tables where relevant factors are weighted and result in activation points and demerit points being decided.

Crucial to the first part of that assessment is the MRP’s view on the conduct which a player has engaged in. This conduct is graded, in ascending severity, Negligent, Reckless or Intentional.

To try to gain some insight into how the MRP assesses players’ conduct, let’s look at the definitions provided for these conduct assessments in the AFL Tribunal Booklet 2010.

Negligence

A player negligently commits a reportable offence if the relevant conduct constitutes a breach of the duty of care owed by the player to all other players. Each player owes a duty of care to all other players to not engage in conduct which will constitute a reportable offence being committed against that other player. In order to constitute such a breach of that duty of care, the conduct must be such that a reasonable player would not regard it as prudent in all the circumstances. Negligence is constituted by a person’s breach of duty to take reasonable care to avoid acts which can be reasonably foreseen to result in a reportable offence. While Australian Football is a contact sport, players owe a duty of care to others not to cause and to avoid illegal contact.

An extra onus applies to protect players from serious neck injuries when they have their head down over the ball and to protect players from bumps to the head. Bumping or making forceful contact to an opponent from front-on when that opponent has his head down over the ball, unless intentional or reckless, will be deemed to be negligent, unless:

a.	the player was contesting the ball and did not have a realistic alternative way to contest the ball; or
b.	the bump or forceful contact was caused by circumstances outside the control of the player which could not reasonably be foreseen.

The definition of negligent also contains specific wording relating to bumps to the head (see rough conduct section starting page 12).

An example of negligent contact may be where a player collides with another player who has taken a mark and where contact occurs just after the mark has been taken. The offending player has a duty of care to avoid any contact which would constitute a reportable offence by slowing his momentum as much as he reasonably can and a failure to do so constitutes negligent.

So, pretty much anything then is negligent!

Recklessness

A player recklessly commits a reportable offence if he engages in conduct that he realises or that a reasonable player would realise may result in the reportable offence being committed but nevertheless proceeds with that conduct not caring whether or not that conduct will result in the commission of the reportable offence. The reckless commission of a reportable offence does not require any wish that the reportable offence be committed.

 

This does not require proof that the player turned his mind to the risk.

A player who without looking swings his arm backwards in a pack and strikes an opposing player in the face may be said not to have intended to strike his opponent but his conduct was reckless because it can be inferred from his action that he realised that his arm might make contact or alternatively a reasonable player in his position would have realised that  such contact might be made. The guideline relating to inferring a state of mind with respect to intentional offences has application to determining if the player acted recklessly. However, even if it is not established that the player realised the risk, he will have acted recklessly if a reasonable player in his position would have realised the risk.

 

In the example given under negligent above, if a player collides with another player who has marked the ball, in circumstances where there is some further time after the mark has been taken, and where he blindly continued on, to contact the player taking the mark, then the act would best be described as reckless.

What’s really interesting here is the section we bolded, and it’s most pertinent to the Campbell Brown–Callan Ward incident earlier in 2011.

Intentional

A player intentionally commits a reportable offence if the player engages in the conduct constituting the reportable offence with the intention of committing that offence. An intention is a state of mind. Intention may be formed on the spur of the moment. The issue is whether it existed at the time at which the player engaged in the conduct.

 

For example, where a player delivers a blow to an opponent with the intention of striking him. Whether or not a player intentionally commits a reportable offence depends upon the state of mind of the player when he does the act with which he is charged. What the player did is often the best evidence of the purpose he had in mind. In some cases, the evidence that the act provides may be so strong as to compel an inference of what his intent was, no matter what he may say about it afterwards. If the immediate consequence of an act is obvious and inevitable, the deliberate doing of the act carries with it evidence of an intention to produce the consequence. Thus it could not realistically be concluded that a player who behind the play and whilst facing his opponent punched him to the face did not intend to
strike him. The state of a player’s mind is an objective fact and has to be proved in the same way as other objective facts. The whole of the relevant evidence has to be considered. When considering the issue the Tribunal Jury must weigh the evidence of the player as to what his intentions were along with whatever inference as to his intentions can be drawn from his conduct or other relevant facts. The player may or may not be believed by the Tribunal Jury. Notwithstanding what the player says, the Tribunal Jury may be able to conclude from the whole of the evidence that he intentionally committed the act constituting the reportable offence.

 

Video examples of respective incidents which are negligent, reckless or intentional, are available. The Laws provide for various categories of permitted contact which shall not constitute a reportable offence.  Such contact includes legally using a hip, shoulder, chest, arms or open arms, providing the football is no more than five metres away, and contact which is incidental to a marking contest where a player is legitimately marking or attempting to mark the football. Tackling and shepherding in accordance with the Laws obviously do not constitute a reportable offence.

With the definition of intentional, the framers of these rules have encouraged the MRP to embark on post-incident mind-reading to determine intent. And this really throws up the capricious nature of the MRP’s deliberations.

Can there be any doubt that Campbell Brown intended to strike Callan Ward? We think not, yet we can only conclude that the MRP relied upon the phrase bolded in the recklessness definition and applied it very literally. In contrast, in one of the other incidents we highlighted in the first part of our MRP assessments discussion, the MRP was able to see into Heath Hocking’s mind and conclude a firm intent to commit a reportable offence despite the clear fact that the opposition player was in the process of applying an off-the-ball block — need we add again that this is illegal?

This is the real nub of the problem with the MRP. These assessments of intent, recklessness or negligence simply fail to match the expectations of disinterested fans. As a result, we’re constantly left scratching our heads over MRP decisions, trying to figure out how a group of apparently sane and rational human beings could get things so wrong.

AussieRulesBlog hopes that we’ve shed a tiny glimpse of light on the process. It is, of course, still more complex, but let’s take a little while to digest this new information.

Oh glorious day! Can it be true? Can Lachlan Murdoch’s Foxtel-friendly decision not to broadcast AFL on the TEN Network from 2012 mean that we’ll soon be without the boring monotony of statistics commentary by Captain Obvious? Can it be the end of the television life of Robert Walls? Oh happy, wonderful, glorious day!

And for those who may have missed it, the following Twitter exchange on the subject:

Zac Dawson:  "Channel ten not showing the footy next year!.. Finally robert 'sourpuss' walls is out of a job. Thank God!.. karma is a b*tch buddy,"

OneHD: "@zacd—6 How about you just worry about getting a kick mate...looks like we'll both be out of the AFL next year."

Having sat in the Great Southern Stand last night and endured the humiliating shellacing handed out by the Hawthorn ‘Reserves’ last night (the Hawks were without putative best-22 members Franklin, Roughhead, Renouf, Gilham, Stratton and Murphy), AussieRulesBlog wonders what Matthew Knights must be thinking now.

Under both Knights and replacement coach James Hird, the Bombers have provided plenty of examples of capability to play the game at an exquisitely high level. Sustained intensity, quarter on quarter, week on week, month on month, seems to be the missing ingredient.

There was no shortage of effort at the ball in the Bombers’ insipid performance last night, but there was little or no unrewarded, off-the-ball effort.

AussieRulesBlog has never engaged in round by round or game by game analysis, and we don’t intend to start now. Nevertheless, pre-season competition aside, the similarities between the team’s effort under Knights and Hird is remarkable, especially given the messy nature of the latter’s ascension to the role.

We would also be remiss did we not marvel at the exquisite disposal skills of Sam Mitchell. If he is not one of the five best players in the competition, then we know nothing about the game. It’s not til you see Mitchell live that you really appreciate the quality of the ball that he provides.

The furore over coaches’ runners in AFL has been brought on purely and simply because of Seven’s packaging of a wired-up Rohan Smith on last Friday night’s broadcast.

Seven’s half-time package of Smith, from the first half of the game, gave the impression that he did nothing other than coach while he was on the field. When a half of AFL lasts fifty to sixty minutes and the runner could spend, practically, at most twenty-five to thirty minutes on the field, a sixty to ninety-second package of vision and audio can hardly be taken as representative of the whole period.

And does anyone believe that Seven’s director and editors didn’t see the opportunity to create some controversy?

AussieRulesBlog is nevertheless puzzled on a number of issues.

Why would Smith agree to wear the wire, presumably being aware of the sensitivity of the issue? Why would the club, through its football department, agree to it? Or did Smith believe he could temper his behaviour and got ‘caught up in the moment’?

It’s hard not to see Seven has having sold Smith and the Bulldogs a pup. It’s hard not to conclude that they knew, or at the very least had a pretty shrewd idea, what they’d get from the exercise.

The most puzzling issue is whether AFL management allow the agenda to be driven by broadcasters or whether they put Seven up to the job to create a clamour for action.

Coaches’ runners spending time on the ground has been a long-standing issue. The nature of AFL, the length of defined periods of play and the size of the field all mitigate against the sort of messaging from the sideline used in, for instance, soccer.

America’s NFL has no need for such messaging because of the stop-start nature of the game, frequent change of on-field personnel and ‘time-outs’.

So, in a practical sense, coaches’ runners in AFL are a mixed blessing. As with any other rule, coaches will push the envelope and stretch interpretations until breaking point. Smith and Seven may have brought the matter to a head, but there’s little prospect of runners being removed from the game.

Finally, according to Caroline Wilson’s article, the AFL is “increasingly concerned that errant on-field messengers were hurting the game as a spectacle”. What? What absolute nonsense! AussieRulesBlog simply cannot think of a single instance where another club’s runner changed the spectacle of the game in any way. Of course, it goes without saying that [WARNING: sarcasm following] our club’s runners have the purest of motives and would never transgress the rules.

AussieRulesBlog can’t imagine that the football departments of the sixteen other clubs are feeling warm and fuzzy to the Bulldogs’ footy department this week.

Tackling with the intent to inflict pain — the sort of tackles that saw Shane Mumford and Justin Koschitzke given short holidays this week — is brutal and unnecessary.

All that is required is to grab an opponent firmly to force them to have to make an attempt to dispose of the ball. At most, dragging them to the ground could be condoned, but these two instances clearly and obviously involve players trying to hurt and disable — perhaps only temporarily — their opponents.

It’s generally accepted — at least AussieRulesBlog thinks it is — that spear tackles and tunneling have been specifically outlawed due to the danger posed. How are the tackles administered by Mumford and Koschitzke materially different? They’re not!

If players want to slam other people’s bodies, let them take up professional wrestling! If they want to be AFL footballers, a higher standard of behaviour is required.

Here at AussieRulesBlog Central we were forcing ourselves to watch the Bombers go down to North again and we noticed, at the start of the third quarter, an umpire call back a player-initiated advantage because “there’s no advantage”. We’re pretty sure we’ve seen this in another game some time over the past couple of weekends too.

As we noted in our Focus on Rules II: Advantage post, for the 2011 season the Law was rewritten to incorporate player-initiated advantage and the provision for the umpire to call the ball back where there is no advantage (17.3.2) was removed.

We don’t know why we’re surprised, but there seems to have been a change in the way this Law is being implemented in the last couple of weeks. We can only assume that The Giesch has seen the criticism and responded in the only way he knows how — by changing the level playing field while the game is being played!

Jeff, is there even the faintest chance that we could see a Law interpreted in the same way for one whole season? This really is beyond a joke.

Release the Giesch!!!!

AussieRulesBlog is sad to note the passing this week of Sydney football and media identity Rex “The Moose” Mossop. Mossop excelled in both Rugby Union (now Super Rugby) and Rugby League (now NRL) through the 1950s and early 60s.

We’ve made no secret of our disdain for “cross-country wrestling” and we never saw The Moose play. It was his media career that, indirectly at first, brought him to our notice.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Sydney author Alex Buzo wrote a series of articles for the National Times highlighting the mangling of the English language by various media performers, not least those among the sporting fraternity. The Once-Yearly Annual Tautology Pennant became mandatory reading for anyone with a sense of both English and humour.

Almost inevitably it seemed, each year Buzo would award first prize to Rex Mossop. Some of his ‘entries’ were:

• if I keep getting Boyd and O'Grady mixed up, it's because they look alike, especially around the head

• now the referee's giving him a verbal tongue lashing

• let me recapitulate back to what happened previously

• he seems to have suffered a groin injury at the top of his leg

• they're going laterally across field

• that kick had both height and elevation

• I've never seen him live in the flesh

• there he is, hopping on one leg

• he's been a positive asset

• they've been going on about it ad nauseam — that means forever

• I've had to switch my mental thinking

• that referee's got glaucoma of the eyes

• I don't want to pre-empt what I've already said

• I don't want to sound incredulous but I can't believe it

• a little bit marginal

• very mobile running

and, most celebratedly, after making a citizen’s arrest of a man leaving a nude beach who’d neglected to dress first . . .

• I don't think the male genitals should be rammed down people's throats …

In the 1990s, Mossop appeared in a panel segment on Andrew Denton’s Live and Sweaty on ABC. Also on the panel were Elle McFeast, Lex “The Swine” Marinos, Debbie “Skull Of Rust” Spillane and Peter “Crackers” Keenan. We don’t remember anything too specific about this other than that it was a hoot and that Debbie Spillane was regularly gobsmacked by Mossop’s comments.

RIP Rex.

Many would suggest that fifty metres is too harsh a penalty for many of the occasions where it is imposed. It cannot be doubted that some of the more gamesmanship-oriented infringements have been eradicated since the fifty-metre penalty was introduced for time wasting. AussieRulesBlog has moments of clear analysis that the harshness of the penalty works, and then there are those occasions when our own team suffers for some seemingly insignificant indiscretion!

Here’s the Law from the 2011 Laws of Football booklet:

18. Fifty-metre penalty

If player-initiated advantage is the ugliest Law in the litter, then deliberate rushed behind is perhaps the most mis-understood.

15.7 Free kicks — Deliberate rushed behind 
15.7.1 when awarded
A free kick shall be awarded against a player from the defending team who intentionally kicks, handballs or forces the football over the attacking team’s goal line or behind line or onto one of the attacking team’s goal posts. In assessing whether a free kick should be awarded under this Law, the field umpire shall give the benefit of the doubt to the defender.

15.7.2 taking free kick
A free kick awarded under Law 15.7.1 shall be taken at the point where the football crossed the goal line or behind line or from the relevant goal post.

This Law was introduced in the wake of what AussieRulesBlog is pleased to call the Bowden Manoeuvre, although it could equally have been called the Guerra Manoeuvre. In the Bowden instance, Richmond’s Joel Bowden handballed the ball through for a point rather than kick out to a contest after a behind — repeatedly. The Tigers were battling to forestall an Essendon come-from-behind victory. Bowden figured, correctly under the rules at the time, that the point he conceded was a smaller penalty than the goal that the Bombers may have created on a turnover from his kickout.

In the Guerra instance, Hawthorn’s Brent Guerra, in a similar circumstance to Bowden, went a step further — we use that term advisedly! — to actually step over the goal line and conceded a point rather than take a kick in after a behind to a disadvantageous situation — again repeatedly.

This Law is quite clear: the umpire is required to judge whether the ball crossing the goal line or hitting the posts was the intention of the defender. Not a lot of grey there — until The Giesch got hold of it.

Under the interpretation currently being peddled by the umpires at the behest of The Giesch and his cronies, a defender who is ‘under pressure’ is permitted to intentionally force the ball over the goal line or onto a goal post — in direct contravention of the Law as written. We wonder whether the Rules Committee created the interpretation at the same time as the rule? In either case, the umpire has to assess either intent or pressure, both very subjective judgements.

The reason we’ve picked this rule is the level of misunderstanding of the interpretation that was to be employed. Despite the AFL releasing a short video demonstrating what would be considered deliberate and what wouldn’t, there was widespread confusion, largely fed by assumption rather than knowledge or research.

Since this Law was introduced, for the 2009 season, we think it has worked pretty well. The Bowden/Guerra manoeuvre, the real target of the Law, has been totally eliminated from the game and defenders have slightly fewer options when close to goal. There have been some notably poor decisions, but given the number of times there is potential for a ruling to be made, those clangers have been mercifully few.

If 2011 has been notable for anything, it has been the slow-motion car crash that is the revised Advantage law. Continuing our Focus on Rules series, AussieRulesBlog looks at the Advantage rule.

Once again, we’ve found new respect for the on-field officials after reading these laws carefully. We hope you’ll gain a new appreciation for the difficulties of their task and the complexities of the laws they are exercising during games.

Here is the Law as it has appeared over the past four years. The (colour) key is:

Black: from 2008 (earliest electronic Laws of Football we could locate).

Red: Inserted 2009.

Blue: Added 2011.

Strikethrough: removed 2011.

The crucial changes, fairly obviously, are those made to Law 17.3. It’s worth noting that the change has removed the umpire’s discretion to call the ball back if advantage doesn’t eventuate — a provision that was available until the 2011 change.

AussieRulesBlog has noted on a number of occasions that “advantage” is quite unsuited to Australian Rules football. Our umpires are schooled, right from the beginning, to blow the whistle when they see an infringement. Players are schooled, right from the beginning, to stop on hearing the whistle. So fundamental has the notion to stop on the whistle been that umpires have been instructed, prior to 2011, to award fifty-metre penalties — based on the “time wasting” provision — against players continuing on with their actions after the whistle.

Into this long-standing tenet of the game, the AFL introduces player-initiated advantage. Players may now play on — as it were — after the whistle, provided they are sure their team is receiving the free kick. In a paradox, if the player continuing on with play gets it wrong, the fifty-metre “time wasting” penalty is still available to the umpire. For the most part, umpires have dealt with this paradox with admirable commonsense.

It’s also worth noting that explanations from The Giesch about controversial advantage decisions have prominently featured the notion that play must be continuous for player-initiated advantage to apply. It’s abundantly clear, reading the new Law 17.3 above, that this is not codified in the Law and is simply a matter of interpretation. The Giesch has been snowing us — again! Any number of advantage situations, especially inside forward 50s, have featured clearly stopped play with one opportunist taking a punt — clearly, to our mind, outside of the spirit of the game even if in sync with the Law as written.

We must note that in other football codes, referees hold the whistle in an advantage situation to see if the advantage plays out. If it doesn’t, the whistle is blown and play returns to the site of the penalty/foul.

The new law 17.3 is a dog and no-one will be surprised if it is euthanased at the conclusion of the season. AussieRulesBlog would go further and remove advantage from our game completely. The vagaries are too large and the penalties too harsh against the other team. Please Adrian and Rules Committee, put this abomination of a law out of our misery!

We’ve just added some clarification in the previous post relating to players having had prior opportunity.