Inside story: The smoking gun in AFL’s umpire debacle over Lachie Schultz’s concussion

Audio of the umpires’s handling of the Lachie Schultz concussion has put the league under the blowtorch. Scott Gullan goes behind who found the ‘smoking gun’, and how the AFL fumbled its response.

The “smoking gun” in Umpire-Gate had been under the nose of the AFL for days.

It was an alert member of Channel 7’s production team who overheard the umpire audio of the Lachie Schultz incident during Thursday night’s Collingwood-Fremantle game.

As the host broadcaster they get the feed of the umpires’ microphones for each game and have the option of including it throughout the game broadcast.

At the time he didn’t think much of it but when the AFL’s “cover-up” started to play out in the days afterwards, the Seven employee passed on his recollection of hearing the umpires discussing the incident on the night.

The tip-off found its way to the team on Tuesday night’s The Agenda Setters, led by host Kane Cornes and Caroline Wilson, who found out the audio in question was in stark contrast to the AFL’s narrative.

But what makes this whole situation even more bizarre, Ch 7 weren’t the only ones to have the audio.

The AFL also gets the feed and the million dollar question being asked now is how they didn’t check it themselves before putting out a press release saying the umpires couldn’t remember the incident.

“It’s unbelievable, they record it, it’s there for them,” one industry source said. “It would have taken one person 10 minutes to find before they send out that release to the media.”

Under siege AFL football boss Laura Kane was forced on Tuesday night to admit the umpires “gave them the wrong information.”

The aired footage was damning of Schultz and Fremantle Jordan Clark’s clash in the middle of Perth Stadium with one umpire saying “got an injured player in the middle. I’m watching. We are OK. We are OK.”

Lachie Schultz collapses in the hands of medical staff after being knocked out. Picture: Paul Kane/Getty Images.

Later an umpire is heard telling a player: “We can only stop the play if the ball is coming near or if they instruct us to.”

The problem for the AFL is they tried to get on the front foot on Friday after grumblings from Collingwood players and officials, including captain Darcy Moore and coach Craig McRae, questioning why the play wasn’t stopped to allow Shultz to be attended by medical staff.

In fact the Pies tried to call for a stretcher which definitely stops play but Schultz insisted on running off.

Instead of saying something along the lines that the umpires felt that with the play on the other side of the ground and a fair distance away from the incident, they thought monitoring initially was the right call given the ball wasn’t anywhere near Schultz.

They could also add that in hindsight it was the wrong call and in future they would stop the play in those circumstances.

A bit of heat would have come for 24 hours but by the time Friday night’s Carlton-St Kilda game got underway it most likely would have been forgotten.

Instead the AFL released a statement which said: “the umpires did not see the injured player at the time so play continued. Upon review, if the umpires were aware play would have been stopped.”

Those three words “did not see” are what clearly caught the attention of the Ch 7 production member who must have started to think he’d been hearing things.

By Tuesday it was clear he hadn’t and by this stage the AFL was spinning itself into a mess. Did the AFL put the umpires under the bus? Did the umpires put Laura Kane under the bus?

Who said what to whom? Were the four umpires actually spoken to? Or did the message get lost through the chain of command?

We may never know what really happened in Umpire-Gate, other than the AFL shooting themselves in the foot with their own smoking gun.