Noah Balta deserves some credit for owning his mistake. But to put it another way, what choice did he have? David Penberthy

The outcome of the assault case involving Richmond AFL player Noah Balta has more inconsistencies than a Tuesday night at the Tribunal, writes David Penberthy.

The outcome of the assault case involving Richmond AFL player Noah Balta has more inconsistencies than a Tuesday night at the Tribunal. And it’s a hell of a lot more serious than a bit of aggro on the field of play resulting in a player being fined for a melee or rubbed out for a fortnight thanks to a quick punch to the guts.

Shorn of its link to the AFL, the Balta case arguably involves the kind of violence which has seen dozens of blokes left dead or with permanent brain injuries and disabilities as a result of yobbo conduct by those who are full of piss, full of pills, full of testosterone.

Richmond footballer Noah Balta arrives at Albury Court for sentencing over the assault of a man in December. Picture: David Geraghty

There are two issues at play here. The first is how the incident was treated by the courts. The second is its handling by the AFL and specifically its decision to let an organisation with a huge vested interest, the Richmond Football Club itself, determine the nature and extent of the penalty for a player it desperately wants to keep on the park.

On both measures, a non-custodial judicial sentence and four-week playing ban seem to fall well short of meeting public expectations.

Let’s deal with the court case first.

Noah Balta should count himself extremely lucky that he’s not spending a second of time in the slammer. As the prosecution said, he belted his victim so hard that the guy launched off the ground. If the victim had landed differently he may well be dead or drinking out of a straw for the rest of his life. Nevertheless, his injuries remained significant. Balta punched him repeatedly in the head, leaving him with a deep gash which was bleeding profusely during the attack, and the victim also required hospital attention for a suspected rib fracture.

The maximum penalty for this assault was five years jail. Instead Balta got no days jail, just a curfew, a ban on returning to the venue, and the usual good behaviour bond malarkey with which we are all tediously familiar.

CCTV of Noah Balta assaulting a man outside a Mulwala club. Picture: Supplied.

Balta wins some slack for having turned himself in to the cops the following day and for having paid the victim to cover the cost of his medical treatment, with a bit more on top to sweeten the deal it appears.

He has also been contrite and effusive in his apologies. He has also endured a degree of shaming which is higher than that felt by the perpetrators in comparable cases, even though all these cases now tend to attract publicity, and rightly so, as the public has had enough of this rubbish and the men who do it deserve to be shamed.

So Balta deserves some credit for owning his mistake. But to put it another way, what choice did he have? We have all seen the footage, or if you haven’t, it can be easily obtained online. A full-blown grovelling apology and the payment of cash to his innocent victim seems completely unavoidable given the undeniable facts at hand. And if all this contrition was a ruse to get on the front foot and head off any jail time, well, all you can say is: it worked.

But what about the AFL component of it all?

In the past couple of days I have heard people make many excellent points about how this four-week ban stacks up compared to other contentious incidents which have brought the game or its players and fans into disrepute.

Here’s a rough sample of them.

If you risk killing a bloke in a drunken car park brawl you get a four-week ban, yet if you’re a fan who throws a flimsy piece of cardboard at a player, you get a two-year ban.

If you use a racist slur that’s not even within earshot of the poor bloke you’re vilifying, you get a six-week ban, two weeks more than for potentially killing someone with a coward punch.

Or to go back to 2019, if you’re young Collingwood player Jaidyen Stephenson and you get caught betting on a few games, you get a 10-week ban from the same organisation that has an official betting partner and enthusiastically promotes gambling to support its ongoing financial operations.

And what about the situation last Monday, where Hawthorn’s Conor Nash concussed Geelong’s Gryan Miers after belting him with a swinging arm?

That offence attracts a comparable penalty to the one issued to Noah Balta at the behest of his employers at Richmond FC.

You could stay up all night ploughing through the Big Footy chatrooms to dig out another dozen examples of these inconsistencies.

The bottom line is this.

The public has had a complete gutful of this random violence and wants everyone in authority to take it a hell of a lot more seriously.

We spoke this week to Neil Davis from the Sammy D Foundation who, with his wife Nat Cook, suffered the horror of losing their son Sam to a coward punch.

Neil made the bleak point that he has now spent more years talking to young men about violence than the length of Sammy’s young life – 17 years. More time talking about Sammy than time spent with Sammy.

That’s what this is about.

And however hard it might be for Noah Balta in the public eye, with everyone talking about you and debating the conduct of the court and the wisdom of the AFL’s management, one thing matters more in all this.

And that’s the right of every young bloke in Australia to be able to make it from one side of a hotel carpark to the other without some macho halfwit trying to knock them out.

Originally published as Noah Balta deserves some credit for owning his mistake. But to put it another way, what choice did he have? David Penberthy