When things get tense, Dwayne Russell is prone to going up an octave, and so it was in the dying light of Saturday afternoon’s game with Hawthorn leading Essendon by four points. “Worpel, the WORPEDO! To finish it all off. BIGGEST MOMENT OF HIS LIFE!”
Had Russell been commentating across all games on Friday and Saturday, he’d have likely required a diuretic, with five of the first six games being decided by less than a kick. If you’re looking for a VFL/AFL precedent, don’t bother, it has never happened before.
But the talking point by Monday morning was unfortunately not the remarkable run of close games that marked the first half of the round, but the punch that gave the weekend its exclamation point… or more to the point, put Fremantle rookie Andrew Bradshaw in hospital with a broken jaw and caved in teeth.
“He’s clubbed him with the inside of his hand, and we see a lot of guys who get bumped, this swinging round arm action that goes on in the game… with tummy punches, or the punched to the chest region,” said Brownlow medallist Jimmy Bartel on AFL media.
Bartell rightly asserted that the AFL was trying to eliminate the game of such actions last season, particularly following Tom Bugg’s six-match suspension for hitting Sydney’s Callum Mills. But at a time when there isn’t a rule change that is off the governing body’s radar, surely now is the time to come down even harder on any action that is not directly related to football. That is to say, it needs to start punishing the act and the intent, not the outcome.
This will likely be more effective than introducing a red card, which while a deterrent, is only effective as a result of an outcome, not intent. It will also likely at times require the use of a video review, and if you want a measure of how successful that may be, speak to an outraged Port Adelaide fan.
On outrage, as we pass through it in regard to Gaff, the words good character and remorse will be fingered like a rosary. It will likely be contended that Gaff never intended to strike Brayshaw in the face, and given Gaff’s record to this point, that cannot be dismissed out of hand. But this should not diminish the opportunity for the AFL to act, but instead demand it. Any previous attempt to do away with jumper punches, tummy punches, and well just about any punch that doesn’t put a kid in hospital, has been a hair-trigger for a sense of grievance that the game is “going soft”.
“We all say we hate violence,” says Jonathan Gotschall, the author of The Professor in the Cage: Why Men Fight and Why We Like to Watch, “but we are still shovelling it in our faces… through movies and video games and sports, and so I think we should just admit it: something in us likes violence.”
Little more than a couple of hours before Worpol’s goal on Saturday, many of the 68,000 who turned up to the MCG were warmed up with both large screens showing the “line in the sand” fight from 2004. To have a football fight as your warm-up guy and then a day later say that Gaff’s punch has no place in our game is disingenuous at best.
And then there’s the Roman circus that Perth’s Optus Stadium resembled on Sunday afternoon. The decision not to remove Gaff from the ground was a questionable one and to, extend the Roman metaphor a little further than it may need to go, threw him to the lions. And in some part, this may go some way towards explaining the perplexing standing ovation he received from West Coast Eagle supporters when he finally came to the bench.
Commentator Tim Gossage went part-way to defending the behaviour of Eagles supporters by pointing out that the replay was not shown on the scoreboards at the ground and that they may have been responding to Michael Johnson’s bump on Gaff. However, many would have been aware of the incident through their radio or smart phones… and those who didn’t would’ve seen an 18-year-old kid assisted of the ground with blood pouring from his face.
As the ABC’s Richard Hinds has pointed out, “If supporters can still find heroism in such an act of blatant thuggery – regardless of which guernsey the offender was wearing – then as fans we have not evolved as we would like to think.”
The bloodlust too has come for Gaff, but when the rage starts to burn away, one of the images that will be left is that of Eagles midfielder sitting on the bench, clearly distressed, head in hands and being comforted by his coach.
But it is the image of a bloodied Brayshaw and the sober, monotone words of Fremantle coach Ross Lyon that should be the AFL’s lodestar to enforce a no-tolerance policy towards any punches in our game.
“Andrew Brayshaw was king hit 100m off the ball,’ said Lyon. “He has got a fractured jaw and four displaced teeth that are caved in and he will be undergoing surgery tonight… I have got an 18-year-old kid that I saw in a real mess when I came down to the rooms, and his mum in tears as I was walking in. So it’s not very palatable.”
