Richmond star Shane Tuck’s AFL career under concussion microscope

Adelaide lawyers and students are scouring hours of match footage for signs of concussion to show to a coroner investigating a former player’s shock death.

Hundreds of hours of vision from of the AFL career of former Richmond player Shane Tuck are being analysed by a team of lawyers and legal students who are looking for any possible concussions suffered during games and aim to present the findings to a coronial inquiry.

Aged only 38, Tuck ended his life in July 2020 and was later diagnosed as suffering from stage three chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative brain disease that is linked to repeated blows to the head. CTE can only be diagnosed by an examination of the brain after death.

The Victorian Coroner John Cain is currently considering how broad the scope of the investigation should be having taken over of the Coronial Investigation after the AFL and

AFLPA submitted that Coroner McGregor should recuse himself.

Richmond's Shane Tuck shrugs the tackle from Docker Ryan Crowley.

Adelaide lawyer Greg Griffin is acting for Katherine Tuck, Shane Tuck’s widow, said the potential danger posed by concussion had been known as far back as 1977 when the International Rugby Board had implemented a three-week stand-down rule if a player suffered concussion during a game, although it later reduced it to seven days when the game turned professional.

Mr Griffin said the point of the video review was to “simply show that while concussion was a live issue during Tuck’s career, there were leading clubs who basically paid it little or no regard at all’’.

The AFL this year introduced a rule that required players to stop training and playing for 12 days after suffering a concussion.

“The state of knowledge has been around since the mid-1970s when it comes to return-to-play protocols and the need to not allow concussed players to return to training and playing until it is safe to do so, but the AFL has only chosen to introduce it the 12 day rule this year due to the threat of litigation which period conveniently ensures that concussed players only ever miss one game,’’ he said.

Yasmin Popovich, Louise Byrne, Caleb Rothe and Angelo Paul are part of the Adelaide team working on the case. Picture: Supplied

The head of Griffins lawyers has employed a team of 12 students and recent graduates from Flinders University to comb through the vision of all the more than 170 games Tuck played for Richmond between 2004 and 2013.

They are not only examining any incident which may have involved Tuck but also any other instance where a player may have endured a concussion or a sub-concussive impact.

A neurologist has been retained to assess all those impacts and grade them from one to five for their potential seriousness.

Mr Griffin said it was already known that concussion had been vastly under reported across the AFL. He is also preparing a class action against the AFL, which involves a number of players, including South Australian Brownlow Medallist John Platten and former Essendon and Geelong ruckman John Barnes.

Louise Byrne has just completed her law degree at Flinders and said it was a valuable experience to “work in a proper, professional firm’’.

“It’s 100 per cent the best way to learn, just to be thrown into a task,’’ the 23-year-old said.