Kane Cornes has called out the AFL Tribunal for upholding Lachie Plowman’s two-game suspension.
Plowman received the ban from MRO Michael Christian for a collision with Hawthorn midfielder Jaeger O’Meara.
The Tribunal decreed that the Carlton defender was not contesting a mark and that he elected to bump.
The Blues are poised to take the call to the Appeals Board, disagreeing with that assertion.
Cornes is in Carlton’s camp, saying the Tribunal and MRO are asking for too much from players moving at full speed.
“This one in particular upset me. These players are running at full speed. Go inside the mind of Lachie Plowman. He has left his opponent, he’s come off to press up as you have trained all pre-season and your whole career to do,” Cornes told SEN SA Breakfast.
“He has sprinted up to force a contest. At the last split second ‘am I going to get there, am I not, I’m going to half-brace, but I’m going to fairly spoil the ball with no intent whatsoever to get Jaeger O’Meara high’.
“And then we slow it down to within an inch of its life and replay it 78 times and go ‘oh, could he have braced there, could he have put his arm out, could have tried to spoil the ball?’
“No. He did exactly what we have always been taught to do and that is make a contest fairly and he’s copped two weeks for it?
“I just think the game is that hard to play and I said the same after Patrick Dangerfield. Dangerfield’s running flat out with Jake Kelly and at the last minute he realised ‘I actually can’t get there so I’m going to brace myself’. He didn’t get him high, but they hit heads.
“We slow that down frame by frame and he gets three weeks.
“I have a lot of sympathy for players who have never been faster or more athletic and then we ping them for a legitimate, fair contest.”
As it stands, Plowman will miss games against Sydney and West Coast.
If his appeal is successful, he will fly up to Sydney alongside Carlton’s VFL team later in the week.