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AFL great Jimmy Bartel has pointed to the tribunal’s updated guidelines as one of the reasons behind players’ confusion over what constitutes a dangerous tackle.
Players all over the competition have been left second-guessing their tackling techniques after a number of suspensions in the first five rounds of the season.
Prior to the start of the season, the AFL amended its tribunal guidelines allowing the match review officer to consider the potential for a player to be injured in an act in deciding a suspension, even if the player was not actually injured during the incident in question.
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Essendon vice-captain Andrew McGrath urged the AFL to provide clarity for its players after seeing skipper Zach Merrett suspended for Anzac Day due to a dangerous tackle in round five.
“All the players would love clarification,” McGrath told reporters on Wednesday.
“We play a game that’s so random and chaotic at times and you’re not exactly sure what’s allowed and what’s not allowed.
“There’s been a lot of cases in the last few weeks of players getting done for similar incidents so it would be great to get a little bit of clarification.
“As the cases are going, we’re sort of figuring out what’s fair and not fair and what’s being permitted.”
Bartel, a three-time premiership winner with Geelong, explained where players had been left confused.
“The issue I’ve got with it is that you’ve still got to make sure that it’s a reportable offence,” he told Nine’s Footy Classified.
“We all agree that we want to get it out (of the game), but where we get confusion is … this potential to cause more damage.
“There’s potential to cause damage at every contest, so it becomes really subjective.
“It used to be (based on) impact, where it’s just off the medical report and whether the player played on.
“Now we’ve got this subjective nature of whether the player could’ve got hurt … I think that’s where the confusion is coming in.”
Bartel said umpires could help the situation by blowing the whistle earlier, before players felt the need to take an opponent down into the ground to hold the ball up.
Essendon great Matthew Lloyd said the tackle had become like the bump, where players needed to understand the consequences of injuring an opponent in the process.
“It’s like the bump now,” he told Footy Classified.
“If you try and execute a bump or you try and execute a tackle, and you either hit them in the head with a bump or you sling them with a tackle and they hit their head, you’re gone.
“If you’re sitting at home and you’re the AFL and you’ve just seen Andrew McGrath and Dion Prestia say, ‘I don’t know’, you would be there tomorrow or on the link-up to every head of football, every coach.
“You know what the coaches should be doing? Coaching it from tomorrow. Dion said, ‘We haven’t been coached it’.”
Former Collingwood president Eddie McGuire also backed up the players’ stance, saying the league needed to provide more clarity.
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“That is changing the name of the game,” he told Footy Classified.
“If we have to do that, then we have to do it. We have to tell people though. One of the things we’ve always been concerned about is that the player that gets the ball has to get a chance to get rid of it.
“No one knows the rule though. If they came out and said, ‘You can’t pull somebody to the ground’, you’d say, ‘OK, I get it’.”
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