Rodney Eade launches king-hit on football thuggery

Stephen Rielly | July 17, 2008



ON Tuesday, Geelong coach Mark Thompson foreshadowed a "pure" game against the Western Bulldogs this Saturday, by which he meant a skilful and legitimate physical contest between the top two teams in the competition to date.

It was Thompson's diplomatic way of slating the sort off-the-ball violence that saw Dean Solomon suspended for eight matches later in the day and has his best tagger, Cameron Ling, nursing four fractures to his right cheek and the reality of a month or more on the sidelines.

Yesterday, his counterpart this weekend, Rodney Eade, made a statement of his own on the subject when he said he would be disappointed if the result of Saturday's game was in any way shaped by illegal force and doubly disappointed if one of his own players was responsible for it.

"There is a right and wrong way to play the game," Eade said. "That doesn't mean you shirk it, but it does mean that you don't go breaking a bloke's jaw off the ball.

"You've got to play hard, aggressive footy. People want to see a contest, a physical contest, as much as they want to see goals and marks and great kicking, but one is sport and the other isn't."

Eade attributes in part the unprecedented skills of the modern footballer to the near-eradication of on-field violence brought about by rule changes and society's less tolerant attitude to violence in sport.

The game has been allowed to blossom tactically and athletically with some of the concerns about thuggery removed from the field, he said.

"If we want our players to put their head over the ball, they have to have confidence that they are protected by the rules from serious harm. Does anyone seriously question that these days?" Eade said.

Eade, like AFL chief executive Andrew Demetriou, who said yesterday that the strong reaction to Solomon's hit on Ling told of how the world, and football with it, had moved on from its Neanderthal past, was mistaken to get nostalgic about so-called yesteryear toughness.

Not even the idea that the game is somehow less of a physical challenge for today's players was correct, he said.

"The game has never been any tougher than what it is at the moment, in a genuine, pure sense. The old-timers might disagree but too often in their time toughness was thuggery," Eade continued.

"A hit behind play, dropping a bloke when he wasn't looking. That's not tough.

"Geelong, apart from being skilful, are a genuinely tough side. They win contested ball and as a rule they don't take their eye off the footy. That's tough. It's not letting a bloke beat you to the ball so that you can whack him in the head. As a game we've lauded a lot of players for being tough when, really, what they did didn't require a lot of courage."

Eade will welcome back mid-fielder Ryan Griffen for the match and forward Scott Welsh, but will have to do without defender Tom Williams for at least another week.

Geelong is expected to have James Kelly make an immediate return after missing with a calf problem, but will be without Ling and Brownlow Medal fancy Gary Ablett.