Adelaide Footy League confident of stopping on-field issues through hard stance on bad behaviour
THE Adelaide Footy League has made headlines for the wrong reasons this year but chief executive John Kernahan says a hard stance on violence is changing the competition.
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FROM the outside looking in, 2018 may seem like a year the Adelaide Footy League will quickly want to forget.
The league booted Salisbury North and Salisbury West from the competition after their latest incidents of bad behaviour, handed down several life bans to players and had some of its worst cases of on-field violence make national headlines.
But league chief executive John Kernahan said the dark images of suburban matches had been created by a minority and did not reflect the whole competition, where “99 per cent of guys are out there to play and enjoy footy”.
This year’s suspension numbers are marginally up on the 2016-17 seasons but significantly down on the three years before that, following the competition’s crackdown on on-field violence since 2013.
Serious offences, such as intentional striking, are lower than they have ever been.
Kernahan said the league did not apologise for its hard stance against on-field violence but was “not trying to make choirboys” out of players.
“What we’re trying to do and do successfully is promote a dynamic that allows players to play a match of footy and inherent risks of injury aside, such as a knee or ankle, be able to go to work on Monday and look forward to the next game,” Kernahan said.
“It’s them and the prosperity of the game in general we are doing this for.
“We can live with a bit of collateral damage for the greater good.”
There were 90 guilty reports across the league’s 23 divisions and 220 teams this season, to the end of the division one minor round, for a total of 232 matches suspended.
This was up from 70 reports and 215 games banned at the same time last year but down on 2013’s tally of 117 reports and 366 matches suspended.
Cases of intentional striking, where a guilty player was suspended for six or more matches, fell from 12 last year to eight this season.
Overall, 22 of the league’s 68 clubs did not have a player banned all season, while two teams, Flinders University and Pembroke Old Scholars, have not had a suspension in at least seven years.
Kernahan said having more games filmed and extra attention on punishing sling tackles and front-on contact had also resulted in more offences.
“The reality is 90 per cent of our clubs are in the good to excellent range which is more than acceptable – it’s the 10 per cent we’re looking to help press their reset button,” he said.
The league turfed Salisbury North out of the competition in June after Alex Stengle’s five-game striking suspension before removing Salisbury West two months later following Adam Jones’s 27-match ban for four violent offences.
Both clubs had a history of serious indiscretions and had signed affiliation agreements, giving the league the power to strip them of premiership points or suspend them if their players were found guilty at the tribunal.
The league this month announced Salisbury North would be allowed to return in 2019 after making efforts to change its culture.
But it denied Salisbury West’s application for re-entry because it did not think strategies to address league concerns could occur before next season.
Kernahan said the league was hopeful of introducing a new demerit points-style system in 2019 that would be more effective and less subjective in identifying clubs that had behaved poorly over a single season or several years. The new system would need to be ratified by the clubs.
“As an administration, we spend an extraordinary and disproportionate amount of time on four or five clubs at the expense of other member clubs,” he said.
“Feedback from our clubs is they have had it to the eyeballs of making allowances for the small number of clubs and players who are still operating in an age old tradition of ‘anything goes’ and ‘what happens on the field stays on the field’.
“We’re in turn questioning why, as a football industry, we offer forgiveness for players who use the playing field to conduct themselves in a manner that if they replicated that behaviour in the street, would find themselves answering to the police and the courts.”
Hope Valley is one of the league’s success stories of turning its behaviour around.
In 2016, the Demons were one of the competition’s worst offenders, facing the tribunal four times for a total of 22 matches suspended, leading to them being placed on an affiliation agreement.
But none of their players have fronted the tribunal since then.
“It was good that the league handed an AAA down because it gave everyone a bit of a wake-up call,” said Hope Valley president Ben Tonkin, who took on the role after the 2016 season. Tonkin said the Demons’ committee implemented a master plan aimed at changing the club’s culture and also appointing new people in leadership positions.
“(What happens on-field) is uncontrollable to a point, but you can control the players and people you allow or bring into the club,” he said.
“You need a long-term plan.
“It stems from the committee level, then to the coaches and then to the leadership group and from there it filters down and builds.
“If Salisbury West or any other club’s committee ever wanted to sit down with our club to share our experiences and knowledge, we would be happy to open our doors.”
Salisbury North football director David Hood said the club knew what was required of it in 2019 and was confident “95 per cent of players” from this year would return.
“The league … have been great, the way they’ve handled things and worked with the club,” Hood said.
“We have a player policy in place, which is harsher than the league tribunal, and appointed a new coach, Joe Hay. The football club is on a different journey.”