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Long received a two-game ban for the act, while Gold Coast\u2019s Touk Miller also received a $5000 fine for his role in the scuffle with Maynard.<\/p>\n
Instead of Maynard\u2019s action being graded as intentional umpire conduct, that could\u2019ve spelt a multi-week suspension, he and Miller were charged with misconduct.<\/p>\n
Speaking on Fox Footy\u2019s The First Crack on Sunday night, Kangaroos great David King was highly critical of the verdict he thinks let down the umpiring department.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think the AFL has been weak piss on this,\u201d King began. <\/p>\n
\u201cThey really have. They had to make a stand for the umpiring fraternity. They are to be protected at all costs.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou can\u2019t go charging 25-30 metres if there\u2019s an umpire in your line of sight. You have to take every precaution available to not have that umpire involved.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey\u2019ve dropped the ball here, in my opinion.\u201d<\/p>\n
MRO hands Long two game ban | 00:56<\/p>\n
While King acknowledged the umpire \u201cput himself in a poor position\u201d for being in the thick of a scuffle, he said \u201cyou can\u2019t touch\u201d the whistleblowers and that the AFL had to make a statement with a Maynard suspension.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis fine business, fines do not work,\u201d King added. <\/p>\n
\u201cYou show me one bit of an evidence where a fine in our game has changed behaviour. We\u2019ve got guys up over $50,000 worth of fines, you have to suspend.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you want to make a change, you have to suspend the players and it goes away like that. But we haven\u2019t done that, it\u2019s extremely soft.<\/p>\n
\u201cI know all Collingwood fans come at you, this is not a Collingwood issue, it\u2019s for the greater good of the game. <\/p>\n
\u201cI think most of the umpiring fraternity would be disappointed in that finding.\u201d<\/p>\n
“I might have a broken rib!” | 01:38<\/p>\n
Western Bulldogs legend Brad Johnson agreed saying \u201cyou can\u2019t touch the umpires\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s it, end of story,\u201d Johnson said. <\/p>\n
\u201cYes, the umpire does charge in, but he doesn\u2019t know what\u2019s coming from behind him.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe\u2019s looking at four players that looked like they were going to get into it after the siren not seeing what was coming.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think they\u2019ll look at their positioning in those certain aspects of play, but that doesn\u2019t take away from the fact that you cannot put one hand on an umpire, regardless of the situation.<\/p>\n
\u201c(Maynard) had tunnel vision, he had one goal in mind and that was to get to Ben Long. And in some ways he had right to see red.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut regardless, the umpire is there, you\u2019ve got to have that awareness to not even go near them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Chief Herald Sun reporter Jay Clark also thinks Maynard was \u201clucky\u201d to get away with a fine on a \u201ctechnicality\u201d under the Match Review Officer guidelines. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt was only really a technicality with the matrix and how the AFL guidelines operate, they were stuck,\u201d Clark said.<\/p>\n
\u201cBecause the $1500 for careless contact was too low, and intentional contact wasn\u2019t going to stand up at the tribunal, because it clearly wasn\u2019t intentional.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo, what they did is created this misconduct loophole, a $5000 fine, to ratchet it up. That will be addressed at the end of the year to cater for a more severe penalty for this sort of dangerous action.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The decision to not suspend Brayden Maynard and Touk Miller for making contact with an umpire has been…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":780594,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[560],"tags":[638,64,63,55,639,85],"class_list":["post-780593","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-afl","tag-afl","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-australian-football-league","tag-australianfootballleague","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/780593","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=780593"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/780593\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/780594"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=780593"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=780593"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=780593"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}