This article appears in SEN Inside Football's January Issue – ON SALE NOW. Subscribe today!
The Match Review Panel is no more — replaced with a far less costly and less cumbersome Match Review “Person”.
New football boss Steven Hocking has made the daring decision to do away with the tried and tested panel version and instead appoint the either extremely brave or extremely naive Michael Christian to go it alone.
Chrisso has been a valuable member of the panel version for three seasons. Just what made him agree to go it alone is unknown.
What we do know is the ex-Collingwood champ will have to develop an even thicker skin than he already has.
For one thing I learnt on the MRP was that it was literally impossible to please everyone.
Our game has so many stakeholders — players, clubs, supporters and media — all with massive degrees of self-interest and bias.
When you combine this with immense passion, you are going to get wildly fluctuating opinions.
A single decision can be described as fair, unjust, horrible or great for the game, depending through which foggy, one-eyed goggle you are looking.
At times the one thing that kept us from exploding was the comfort that we were part of a panel and our decisions were made by consensus, meaning that none of us had to carry the scrutiny alone.
This will no longer be the case as Chrisso will carry the can for all good and bad, fantastic and horrible decisions.
One thing they have done is made a good choice in Christian.
Chrisso is an experienced football man with a genuine love of the game and desire to see it flourish.
Having said that, if there was a panel member I have battled most over the past three years it would be him.
He would agree that we didn’t always come from the same angle.
Chrisso, who has young sons playing the game and is involved with grassroots football, was often concerned with the look of the incident and how it would reflect at other levels.
You would expect this from a member of the Laws of the Game Committee.
I, on the other hand, probably took more the players’ position and tried to put myself in their shoes for that brief period of time, often finding what I thought were plausible reasons for their actions.
It led to some long Monday afternoons as we would often agree to disagree and eventually let democracy run its course by putting decisions to a vote. While I didn’t love every decision we made, I could certainly live with everything we did.
That was the rule: if you didn’t love it you had to be able to live with it.
Apparently the move was made in part to have a more flexible decision-making process, with 24-hour turnarounds becoming the norm.
Hocking comes from clubland where the feedback from coaches was that they didn’t want to wait until Monday afternoon — or even Tuesday — to determine their teams for the coming week.
I can see how this would be helpful to clubs, however the new system will not be without its dangers.
Firstly, it is impossible for the MRPerson to watch and highlight incidents from all nine games over a weekend.
This leaves the umpires (who are increasingly reluctant to flag incidents) and the Score Review Officers to scan every game and spot indiscretions.
Now I don’t want to be critical, but they do tend to be a bit gung-ho on reporting incidents, so I hope we don’t start to get too finicky and fine players for increasingly minor incidents.
And for the clubs to get the quick results they are after they had better get their acts together.
Every week we sat there on Monday afternoons waiting for medical reports to filter through, often from games played on Friday or Saturday.
If the clubs want quick decisions then the turnaround time for medical reports has to become hours, not days.
Although even this presents a problem too, as many scans aren’t completed until at least 24 hours post match.
You would hate to grade an incident as low impact only to find out half a day later that the player had suffered a broken jaw and would miss four weeks.
Swift justice is not always so just.
Plus we will all now be able to compare incidents and outcomes from the day before and not the previous week.
This will exponentially increase the scrutiny on decisions, as we will have fresh precedents with which to play bush lawyer.
I can see the half-time reports now: “This got a week yesterday, so this player has to get the same today”.
I am not so sure that having one adjudicator will increase consistency either.
Rarely are two incidents alike and with guilty pleas, bad records and the like what seem to be similar incidents can result in different penalties. This happens with surprising frequency.
And let’s pray the AFL doesn’t decide to change the landscape midway through the season as it did in 2017.
Instead of holding fast it panicked and wanted interpretations changed to restrict jumper punches.
To me this was a knee-jerk reaction that created unnecessary confusion.
However, I am glad that several other changes the panel recommended at the end of last season have been implemented.
Like making it easier to appeal decisions, and increased leniency for some low-impact actions.
Of course Chrisso won’t be sitting all alone in a room making his decisions.
There will be one or two AFL administrators, most likely a recent retired past player, working at AFL House also, an umpires rep, and even Mr Hocking will drop by.
However, none of them will receive the scrutiny of the lone panel member.
I hope between now and the start of the season influential media members take the time to learn the system so that when they comment they are coming from a place of knowledge, not stuck in 1985.
I loved my time on the MRP but do look forward to being able to speak openly about incidents and give “my” opinion and not always the party line.
I can’t wait for that.
I will reserve my judgment on whether the new system will work.
Let’s hope it’s a hit and that the only person hung out to dry if it doesn’t is the one who made the change.
The January issue of SEN Inside Football is out now. It is jampacked with all your off-season footy yarns. Subscribe today!