AFL runners can jog on, says Scott

Melbourne’s Brad Scott has poured cold water on the increasingly hot-underthe-collar coaches incensed by changes to AFL runners.

Two premiership-winning bosses – Hawthorn’s Alastair Clarkson and Western Bulldogs counterpart Luke Beveridge – are among the coaches to have made plain their frustrations at the new rules taking effect from Round 1.

The 2019 rule tweak means runners are only allowed to deliver messages from the coachSTEELE es’ box after goals, and must be already heading for the boundary when the ball is bounced.

Beveridge told SEN radio “the vast majority of the senior coaches … haven’t been listened to” but the well-tenured Scott, who begins his 10th season as an AFL coach this weekend away to Fremantle, called for calm.

“The slight adjustment is a common-sense adjustment,” he said. “AFL football is a player’s game.

“As a coach, I’d still like a mechanism to get messages out because we don’t have time-outs and we don’t have long to get our messages out. We’ve still got that facility and I think it’s a pretty good compromise.”

Scott said suggestions the rule had been rushed or implemented without feedback were rubbish.

“We’re playing our first regular-season game without (full use of runners) but we trialled it in the JLT (pre-season) 12 months ago,” he said. “We used it in the JLT this year. We won’t be saying post-game that the runners cost us the game. We’ve had enough time.”