The Lachie Neale case highlighted a flaw in AFL’s rules. Here’s my lawyer’s fix

September 25, 2026 — 7:23pm

You have reached your maximum number of saved items.

Remove items from your saved list to add more.

Usually, the AFL punishes on-field misconduct in the currency of matches, which it considers fungible.But that premise is false; it produces a small number of cases where sanctions are grossly out of whack with the crime.

On Thursday night the AFL Appeal Board overturned Lachie Neale’s one-match ban and instead fined him $10,000. Sensible outcome and good luck to him. But the route Neale took back to the MCG – wide open to him; bolted shut to almost everybody else – demonstrated that the defect lies in the rules, and that rescuing one man’s week fixes nothing.

Late in the first quarter of last Saturday’s preliminary final, Neale slugged Hawthorn’s Jack Ginnivan in the guts, behind play and off the ball. The match review officer graded the conduct intentional, the impact medium and the contact to the body. That yielded a fixed sanction of one match.

On Tuesday night, the tribunal found the blow forceful and intentional, delivered off the ball to an unsuspecting opponent; rejected the player’s account as inconsistent with the camera vision; and held that the case for exceptional and compelling circumstances didn’t outweigh the nature of the conduct.

On Thursday night, the Appeal Board saw it differently. The tribunal had erred in law, it held, by weighing the intentional nature of the strike against Neale when asking whether exceptional and compelling circumstances existed. Intention was an element of the charge, already proved, so counting it again was double-dipping.

That left only the other side of the ledger, being Neale’s exemplary playing record: over 300 games, two Brownlow Medals, two premierships as captain and four All Australian selections. Thirteen seasons without a suspension.

The Appeals Board applied some creative mathematics and rounded one match down to $10,000.

Is all of this necessary? We all know that nobody would bother with all the legal gymnastics if this was a round-seven match. Had it gone the other way, Neale would’ve been the first player since 2003 to miss a grand final over something done the week before. Sport, sometimes, can be a cruel mistress.

We should rightly accept the findings of fact. The place to quarrel is with........

© The Sydney Morning Herald