Former long-serving AFL match review panel (MRP) member Peter Carey doubts whether the withdrawn Leigh Montagna striking charge would have been laid in his time.
The current panel has copped criticism for charging Montagna with striking, a charge that was withdrawn shortly before the St Kilda star was due to risk a three-game ban at the tribunal on Tuesday night.
Tribunal counsel Jeff Gleeson SC recommended the unprecedented decision after Montagna and Melbourne opponent James Magner spoke to him about their clash during Saturday night’s game at the MCG.
It emerged that Magner’s cheek was cut by an accidental collision with Montagna’s knee – not a strike.
Carey, who umpired 307 games at the top level and served on the MRP from 2005-10, refused to directly criticise the current panel.
But he said it was the type of case, during his time on the panel, in which an AFL investigator would have been called in before a charge was laid.
“You would think so,” Carey told AAP on Wednesday.
“If the footage was inconclusive and we were unsure, we always went to the investigator and said ‘Would you talk to the two players and find out what’s going on?’.
“If Magner said, ‘I got a knee to the head’, we’d say that Montagna’s got no case to answer.”
But Carey, now the National Basketball League’s referees manager, said he was not in a position to rate the work of panel chairman Mark Fraser and colleagues Des Gleeson and Bryan Sheehan.
He said, as with umpires, waves of criticism about the judiciary tended to generate their own momentum.
“If enough people get on the bandwagon, it will blow out of all proportion,” Carey said.
The AFL declined to comment about the match review panel’s performance.
But North Melbourne coach Brad Scott, whose forward Lindsay Thomas is one of four players in as many rounds to be cleared of a charge laid by the panel, said he had no concerns.
Scott said, as with Thomas, the Montagna case eventually reached the right outcome.
“Over a six-to-12 month period, if that trend keeps continuing, then I’m sure the powers-that-be will make changes to that process,” Scott said.
“But I’ve got no problem with the process as it sits at the moment.
“The correct decision has been made in the end.”
Carey recalled coming under fire in 2010 for clearing Carlton captain Chris Judd over an elbow which drew blood from the face of Fremantle star Matthew Pavlich.
Carey now admits to second thoughts over that decision.
“Probably in hindsight, you would say maybe we should have erred on the other side of it,” he said.
“But we were pretty comfortable with it – all of us were.”
The elbow, dished out while the pair were lying on the ground, was deemed to be below the force required to constitute an offence, despite Pavlich requiring staples under his eye.
Judd won his second Brownlow that season.