Gold Coast forward Ben Long sparked a wild melee with a crude elbow to Collingwood\u2019s Brayden Maynard<\/a> on Saturday night. All three incidents occurred with a field umpire within close vicinity.<\/p>\nLong on Sunday was handed a two-match ban for rough conduct against Maynard, yet wasn\u2019t penalised for a free kick in the moment.<\/p>\n
MRO hands Long two game ban | 00:56<\/p>\n
\u201cThe umpire is in the perfect position here to pay a free kick to Brayden Maynard,\u201d Johnson told Fox Footy\u2019s First Crack. \u201cThat is a free kick every day of the week.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe was snipered from behind, didn\u2019t know it was coming, potentially could have a broken rib off the back of it \u2013 zero free kick paid.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf that umpire pays the free kick, maybe it deflates a little bit of the way Maynard is feeling. Yes he was hit hard and blindsided, but if he gets the free kick it maybe calms the farm a little bit.\u201d<\/p>\n
On the Lewis-Blakey incident, Johnson said: \u201cIt\u2019s not a report by any stretch of the imagination. Is it a free kick? Maybe borderline. But no free kick was paid there either.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat one doesn\u2019t worry me too much because it was front-on, he\u2019s not blindsiding him, he\u2019s facing him, he can see him coming at least and you can prepare yourself \u2013 unlike the Long one.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nick Blakey wasn’t penalised for this.Source: FOX SPORTS<\/p>\n
But Johnson was left mightily disappointed that Reid was punished.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is the one that frustrated me the most. I hope he\u2019s not adjudicated differently in our game,\u201d Johnson said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat there on Berry \u2013 that\u2019s (paid) a free kick against at an important time of the game \u2026 It\u2019s not even \u2018light\u2019 (contact). It is less than a feather.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe cannot be serious that we\u2019re giving Harley Reid a free kick (against) for that when we don\u2019t give a free kick to Blakey or (against) Long in worse scenarios.<\/p>\n
\u201cBerry goes down. He didn\u2019t get hit in the stomach, so Berry should get done for a stage and that\u2019s got to go out of his game. There is nothing at all in that. There is no reason why he should flex over.\u201d<\/p>\n
Harley Reid was penalised for this.Source: FOX SPORTS<\/p>\n
Asked by First Crack host Jay Clark if Reid was \u201cbeing punished for being Harley Reid\u201d, Johnson said: \u201cHe\u2019s an aggressive player, right? We love the way he goes about it, he throws his arms around and jumps in and is going to get penalised along the way.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut that one there? No way. Not with what else we saw on the weekend.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Western Bulldogs games record-holder Brad Johnson has questioned whether Harley Reid is being \u201cadjudicated differently\u201d after being left…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":781758,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[560],"tags":[638,64,63,55,639,85],"class_list":["post-781757","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\/781757","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=781757"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/781757\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/781758"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=781757"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=781757"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=781757"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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