Well, Barry Hall got seven weeks and all I have to say is, whatever.
Frankly I’m not quite sure what everyone got so hot and bothered about. As far as I can tell a player infringed the rules of the game- yes it was really really bad, and very dangerous and could possible have killed the guy* – but it was against the rules of the game and Hall has now been punished under those rules. Where exactly did the system fall down? We have already eradicated that kind of violence from the game and this is proof positive.
There will be those that say he didn’t get long enough, there will be those that say he got too long, there will be those that say he shouldn’t start serving the penalty until he is fit to play (though how the game could police this is a pretty big questions). But I think that on the whole the AFL has handled the whole thing with composure while the media worked itself into a tizz.
Please don’t ask Barry Hall why he did it. He wasn’t thinking when he hit Staker and I can just about guarantee you that no clearer or more rational explanation is going arise over time. It’s pointless to ask and Hall’s lame excuse of a ‘mind snap’ is somehow even worse than not saying anything at all.
A fuss will now be made about whether players should be able to be sent off during a game. Call me old fashioned, but leaving players on the field after they have been reported is one of the few rules that distinguish Australian Rules from other forms of football around the world, and it is one of the few rules that hasn't been fiddled with over the game’s 150 years. So I think we should leave it.
In conclusion, a guy hit another guy on the footy field. It was ugly and it was not within the rules of the game. As a result the guy got suspended. Can we all calm down a bit now?
And while we are calming down, can we perhaps discuss the fact that a player broke their arm on an advertising barrier on the side of the ground and will now be sidelined for weeks? I don’t know about you, but I’d be pretty keen to make sure that didn’t happen again.
*Anyone who disputes that a single punch can kill or permanently brain damage anyone (I’m looking specifically at the male panel members of Footy Confidential) is flat out wrong.
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I'd like to know your opinion on claims that Hall was tried by the media and was thus unable to receive a fair trial in the tribunal.
Now in real life, i agree that trial-by-media is a terrible thing. On occasion, however, protection against trial-by-media verges on censorship.
(Consider, for example, the stifling of the Tasmanian newspapers and TV news after the Port Arthur massacre in 1996. The details of the event were not made public in Tasmania, in order to keep the jury pure. However I'd argue that the direct result was a lack of comprehension and healing amongst the locals who were left wondering what had really occurred. Yes, a trial-by-media was averted, but at what cost? This was in the early years of the internet, mind, so we weren't all just jumping on the the net to read the juicy details in the Age Online.)
That aside, how do you think trial-by-media relates to sport, given sport's symbiotic and mutually dependent relationship with media? Would suppression of media reports verge on censorship? Is the media capable of controlling itself and resisting reporting on such events? Or is sport outside the realm of natural justice, given it writes and adheres to its own set of laws?
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