Regardless of the outcome of Thursday night’s appeal hearing regarding Bachar Houli’s two-week suspension, the AFL has made a mockery of its own judicial process with an unprecedented vote of no confidence against its own tribunal. In scenes that bring to mind the pantomime of WCW wrestling, tribunal members themselves must wonder whether their positions even remain tenable.
This situation, and many more like it, are sadly inevitable when every tier of the game’s administration is more intent on reacting to murmurs of discontent and reasserting their own inflated sense of importance than they are establishing the clear and irrefutable regulatory processes required to run a billion-dollar sporting organisation.
Where the outcome of this case leaves fans is another bone of contention. The league is effectively telling supporters that, on one hand, they should respect the umpire’s decision, but on the other, say nothing when the league itself publicly and embarrassingly disputes that very same decision – a call made by people the AFL themselves have put in place and provided with guidelines to avoid moments like this. Do as I say, not as I do.
The gaffes in the Houli case are clear to see. Considering a players’ clean disciplinary record while meting out a punishment is one thing, but ignoring your own clearly-defined rules and turning the judicial process into an episode of This Is Your Life is quite another.
Even while hearing Malcolm Turnbull and Waleed Aly’s bromides, the panel still only had to answer a simple series of questions: was Houli’s contact with Jed Lamb head-high? (Definitely.) Was it intentional? (Not even Mick Molloy would argue otherwise.) And was the impact severe? (A little hard to argue against that when the victim is lying face down, unconscious.) Whether Houli is a good bloke or not really shouldn’t have mattered. As per current rules, it was a three-week offence at a minimum.
On Tuesday, jurors used the framework provided by the 2017 AFL tribunal guidelines, which contain one particularly pertinent, unsexily-titled section: “6.1 General directions.”
You do not decide the case according to prejudice, bias, sympathy, gossip or anything else. If there has been any television, radio or press publicity, you should totally disregard that. You should totally disregard any comment about the case by any coach, club member, official, commentator or any other person. It is your duty to act independently and impartially.
If the Houli case proceeded in strict adherence to those rules, a number of the concerned parties have a lot of explaining to do.
Still, it is worth bearing in mind that the jurors in this case – David Neitz, Hamish McIntosh and Wayne Henwood – were considered by the league to be qualified for their job. That they chose to disregard their own guidelines and give in to the vibe of the evening is a mistake for which the league itself needs to take responsibility, not whinge.
Clearly, the AFL needs to set a minimum penalty for tribunal cases involving a guilty verdict for intentional head-high contact with severe impact. That leeway exists to create farces like the Houli ruling is the league’s own fault.
Putting all of that to one side, the problems in this case go deeper than a judicial panel being swayed by the calibre of one players’s LinkedIn endorsements. There actually could have been a case to suggest that Houli’s two-week ban is appropriate, it’s just that it would require an entirely new and perhaps more appropriate set of tribunal rules.
Central to the furore in this and so many other striking and charging cases are the interwoven issues of intention and impact, both of which the current guidelines view in terms that are far too simplistic.
Striking and charging (along with kicking, stomping, rough conduct and a number of others) are what’s termed “classifiable offences”. What does that mean? Well, in the AFL’s view such offences should be graded as intentional or careless (Houli’s contact with Lamb was graded intentional), their impact assessed as severe, high, medium or low, and then, according to the point of contact (categories: all, high/groin, body), assigned a set punishment. Punishments currently run from a $1,500 fine up to a three-week suspension, with the tribunal to step in and adjudicate on all intentional/severe impact cases, as well as high impact cases involving the head or groin.
The good part: this system has helped to standardise punishment and provide a less subjective result. The bad: it is only theoretically comprehensive, because it doesn’t take into account the precise nature of each individual case. Just as there is no cookie-cutter offence, there should be no uniform response to it.
Take Houli’s situation. Here is a player running away from his opponent in an attempt to get to the drop of the ball. Lamb, in an attempt to curb Houli’s influence, is scragging at his opponent’s jumper. In this instance, with his back to the player he has “attacked”, Houli is more honestly seeking to brush him off and break the tag.
Clearly the action action itself is reckless and its impact significant, but establishing and scaling the actual intent of the offender is difficult. Is this more or less serious than a case in which a player charges towards a contest with eyes only for his opponent, and charges full pelt into the ball carrier with the intent of knocking him over, but somehow doesn’t harm him as badly as Houli did Lamb?
The AFL tribunal guidelines provide 37 examples of striking cases and their outcomes, but that so many are needed tells you plenty about the myriad combinations of factors at play when a ruling is made.
The hunter/hunted distinction is among many not currently factored in. Should identical offences be graded differently according to the proximity of the ball? Is a player who strikes an opponent to the head while taking evasive action as bad as one who prompts that evasive action but causes less damage in his attempt to take out his opponent?
Every weekend players react to dynamic game situations on impulse, but when those impulses result in contact with an opponent, we treat those events in terms far too simplistic, as though carelessness and malice are the only explanations for reportable contact.
The biggest hit worn in this episode has been to the credibility of the AFL. They have effectively labelled their own tribunal a kangaroo court and exposed flaws they themselves have engineered into the rules. That such an arbitrary ruling as Houli’s can be made is less a reflection on those handing it down than it is on those who provide them the opportunity to do so.
