BEVO: RULES A DOG’S BREKKIE
WESTERN Bulldogs coach Luke Beveridge has railed against significant confusion around tackling rules in the AFL which he labelled a “dog’s breakfast”.
The premiership coach’s call came after the AFL tribunal downgraded Cat Luke Dahlhaus’s dangerous tackle suspension to a fine and overturned Port Adelaide’s Sam Powell-Pepper’s ban.
Earlier this season the Bulldogs lost an appeal against a one-game ban for defender Hayden Crozier for a dangerous tackle. Beveridge said in the current environment, Crozier would get off.
Beveridge said he couldn’t give his players any instructions around what they could do because he didn’t know, and telling them to “be careful” would send the wrong message.
“There’s a lot of confusion. It’s not just the free-kick aspect, now it’s the sanctions and the penalties,” Beveridge said on Thursday.
“It lines up with the lack of understanding around the interpretation of the ordinary prior opportunity rule. We just ask players to play, and since they were six and seven they have played the game, and now they are adults, we’ve got to make sure we continue to play the game with the intent we always have.
“You can’t tell them to be careful, and you can’t instruct them either way because you’re not sure which way to instruct them. That’s the shame of it all. We as coaches have no handle on which way to coach it. At some point we have to stabilise it.”
The AFL looked to up the ante around sling tackles after Hawthorn veteran Shaun Burgoyne copped only a fine for a serious tackle on Geelong’s Patrick Dangerfield in Round 2. Melbourne’s Alex Neal-Bullen was given a four-game ban for a sling tackle in Round 10. But Beveridge said the “goalposts” had been shifted again since then, and confusion reigned.
“We went from the peak body wanting to make a stand … but here we have these incidents when an arm is pinned, there’s a sling, and players are getting off,” he said. “We keep moving the goalposts, and supporters are crying out to have something in black and white. It’s a bit of a dog’s breakfast.”
The Bulldogs take on Geelong on Friday night in a match Beveridge said would go a long way to establishing whether his side was a premiership contender.
Beveridge has 41 fit players to choose from, a rarity for any team in 2020, but said there was no point having a healthy list and not playing finals.
“They (Geelong) probably played the best game that anyone has played all year against the Saints a number of weeks back,” he said. “Until we establish a strong consistency in our own performance we won’t consider ourselves as being contenders.”