Record-breaking umpire Shane McInerney sympathises with the increasing number of AFL footballers banned for dangerous tackles and predicts they may stop dragging rivals to the ground as a risk-prevention measure.
Essendon captain Zach Merrett was the latest player to be cited for a dangerous tackle by the match review officer, while Giants star Tom Green could follow, after Hawthorn’s Will Day and Cat Gary Rohan were suspended last week.
Day, Richmond defender Nathan Broad and Port Adelaide’s Ryan Burton all received multi-match bans this season for the action, which has become a weekly talking point amid the wider concussion debate.
McInerney, who umpired 502 AFL games between 1994 and 2019, including two grand finals, witnessed a significant tackling evolution throughout his career, as well as major changes in the way they were officiated.
The “spear tackle”, as he worded it, has long been extinct from the modern game, and he believes the sling tackle has effectively evolved into, but is quite different from, what is now known as a dangerous tackle.
“I absolutely do feel sorry for the players,” McInerney told The Age.
“Players are so much stronger nowadays … when they’re trying to tackle someone; it’s almost like two wrestlers going at it – they all have strong core muscles and leg muscles. It’s almost like an arm wrestle.
“Finally, someone wins [the test of strength] and it reaches a point where someone collapses and someone doesn’t, where a player’s arms might be pinned, and their head then makes contact with the ground.
“It’s got to be a tough one for players, and I’m not sure what the solution is because I support everything the AFL is trying to do to eliminate head trauma as much as they can.”
The AFL announced a crackdown on dangerous tackles ahead of the 2016 season, but current rules have their origin in mid-2020, after ex-Hawk Shaun Burgoyne escaped with a fine. League headquarters subsequently tweaked the laws to introduce “the potential to cause injury” rather than relying on whether the player tackled was hurt, or not, to determine a sanction.
Shaun Burgoyne was fined, not suspended, for this tackle on Patrick Dangerfield in mid-2020.Credit: Getty Images
“We were coached at the time [2016] to spot if a player might have lifted an opponent above what we called ‘the horizontal’,” McInerney said.
“A dangerous tackle then was more of a dumping motion, and I know that’s not where we are now …
“The way we were trying to manage it, or penalise, was based on the cues. If you see a player lifts him up [was the first one] – almost feet above head, which is what we meant by above the horizontal position – then we talked about a player being in a vulnerable position, where he was dumped on his head. It didn’t matter if his arms were free or pinned in the tackle.”
Shane McInerney broke the AFL umpiring games record in 2019. Credit: Chris Hopkins
McInerney supports the change in interpretation after the Burgoyne incident, and can understand why someone such as Merrett would feel frustrated but that “ultimately they are accountable for their actions”.
“What might start as a reasonable tackle, you suddenly find yourself missing a week, which must be hard for players to reconcile,” he said.
“I have no doubt that not for one split second do any players have any intention to hurt their opponent like that. They just want to lay as strong a tackle as they can, and make sure the ball doesn’t come out.
“Players will have to be wary that at a certain point in a tackle, if they continue with it, it might have a bad outcome. We might find players don’t want to take an opponent to ground because they have already tackled him, have the ball pinned and possibly think, ‘Do I gain anything from taking him to ground?’”
McInerney dismissed criticism that umpires needed to blow their whistle earlier, saying that was only relevant in certain situations where players were “gravitating to a stoppage” rather than in one-on-one circumstances.
But he did highlight AFL grounds being harder these days than when he began umpiring at AFL level as a contributing factor.
“I don’t want this to be seen as an excuse, but grounds are so hard these days,” McInerney said.
