Cop 16 and you’re out!

By Brad Kingsbury
FOOTBALLERS who have been suspended for 16 matches or more over their careers can forget about playing with, coaching or having any official involvement with any club in any league in Victoria.
That is the upshot after the Victorian Country Football League (VCFL) adopted the AFL Victoria DeRegistration Policy and informed all affiliated competitions that it would be enforced this season.
The policy reads as follows:
“Senior players shall be automatically deregistered and not allowed further registration with the same or another league it the player has accumulated a combined total of six weeks’ suspension (or greater) in a senior career (including AFL career)”.
The policy has drawn criticism in that it is retrospective with no starting date.
This means that some older players and coaches who have forged decorated careers may have their records tainted due to incidents that happened more than a decade ago during their formative years and for which they had already been penalised.
However VCFL area manager for eastern Victoria, Shaun Connell, said he expected minimal impact on current lists, if any at all.
He said if there were disputed cases, there was an appeal procedure within the system (at a cost of $550) that had the power to rule on the merit of an individual’s circumstances on a casebycase basis.
“To my knowledge there’s noone in my area that will be affected by it,” he said.
“It’s not a new policy and it’s come directly through AFL Victoria, so we have to enforce it. It includes all senior games at all levels including AFL.
“Players will be warned in writing when they’ve reached 10 matches, so it wouldn’t be a sudden thing,” he said.
Several Casey Cardinia League club officials expressed concern that the rule assumed that the penalties issued by tribunals, manned by volunteers who had little or no legal training or authority, were correct and that there was no consideration of those suspensions now being cumulative.
Outspoken Berwick president Peter Jensen said the rule was unfair and missed the point.
“They’re too late, they should have done it in the ’70s and ’80s when people were being carried off on stretchers every week,” he said.
“It’s an insult to the tribunal members who assess cases on their merit and take into account previous history.
“Now a player could get ‘life’ for swearing at an umpire or something stupid like that. They’re not the thugs that you want out of the game, but the rule doesn’t discriminate does it?”
A leading club coach in the district said the rule could stop players who had finished their careers at AFL or VFL level looking towards extending their involvement at grassroots level and giving something back to the game.
“It’s going to pull the hearts out of people who want to keep playing or stay involved,” he said.
“How’s a kid supposed to learn? When you get a bit older you get wiser and realise that it’s not worth knocking people around, but some kids have to learn that the hard way.
“They go through that, learn respect for the game and their opponents and now they’re told they can’t play. That’s just rubbish.”
Casey Cardinia League operations manager Ian Benson said searching every player’s records from every club they had played for (throughout Australia) was almost impossible in some cases.
He said that it could come to the point where players would not be registered with the league until they had signed a legal document such as a statutory declaration stating their records.
Even then there could be doubts.
West Gippsland Latrobe Football League general manager Chris Soumilas said that records showed that there were no players close to the 16week trigger point in the WGLFL.
However some players’ records outside the league were unknown.
He added that while he understood the reasoning behind the move, it seemed a little unfair to impose an extra penalty on players who had already paid the price for their misdemeanours at the time.