Welcome to the Tribunal, Son — It Only Gets Weirder

There are two great levellers in Australian football: getting dropped to the twos, and fronting a Tribunal. One young Saint has now experienced at least one of those rites of passage, after his case was referred directly to the VFL Tribunal — bypassing the Match Review Officer entirely and landing him straight in the big chair.

Welcome to the process, son. Pull up a seat. The rest of us have been here a while.

Why a Direct Referral Is a Different Beast

Most players go through the MRO first. They get graded, they’re offered a suspension of a certain number of matches, and they can either accept it and move on with their life or contest it and let the Tribunal decide. It’s a system I’ve come to understand in painful, intimate detail over the years of following Essendon — more on that later.

But a direct referral skips that first step entirely. When the MRO refers a matter straight to the Tribunal, it’s generally because the incident is considered serious enough that a straightforward grading and sanction offer isn’t appropriate. It’s the system saying: this one needs a proper hearing. The player doesn’t get the option of a quiet fine and an early guilty plea. They sit in front of the Tribunal and make their case — or don’t — and the panel decides the outcome.

For a young footballer, particularly one still finding their feet in senior or semi-elite football, that’s a genuinely daunting experience. You’ve trained your whole life to play footy, and suddenly you’re sitting in a room with legal counsel, the AFL’s representatives, and a panel of former players and legal minds dissecting one moment from one game. It’s a lot.

The Tribunal: An Accidental Expert’s Guide

I say with absolutely no pride that I am something of an unofficial authority on how this whole system works. Not because I sought out the knowledge — trust me, I didn’t — but because supporting Essendon over the past couple of decades has essentially enrolled me in a masterclass I never asked for.

We’ve had players go early, players contest and win, players contest and lose, and a few situations that were so convoluted they could have been law school exam questions. At this point I could probably sit in on a hearing and follow every procedural step without a program.

What I’ve learned is this: the Tribunal is genuinely independent, it takes its job seriously, and outcomes are never as certain as the morning-after hot takes on social media suggest. A lot of people see a rough act on the video and immediately declare the sentence — but the Tribunal looks at intent, prior record, the force involved, the nature of the contact, and the overall context. Sometimes cases that look open-and-shut are anything but.

What We Know About the Saint’s Situation

The player in question is a young Saint — and when I say young, I mean this is almost certainly one of those moments that will either define how they approach the physical side of the game going forward, or fade into a footnote in a long career. We’ve all seen both outcomes.

The incident was considered serious enough for a direct referral, which means the football department at Moorabbin will have been preparing for this hearing with some care. St Kilda have invested heavily in their list over the past few years — they’re not a club that can afford to lose a developing player to a lengthy ban, especially one playing VFL footy trying to push for senior selection.

The specifics of what happened in the game — the exact nature of the incident, the position on the ground, the circumstances — are the kind of things the Tribunal weighs up carefully. Without being there, and without the full vision in front of us, it’d be unfair to draw firm conclusions. The Tribunal has ruled, the process has run its course, and that’s how it should work.

\h2>The VFL Is Not a Safe Harbour

Here’s something worth saying, because I think it occasionally gets forgotten: the VFL is not some consequence-free development league where players can do whatever they like because nobody’s watching. The AFL watches. The Tribunal sits. Decisions made in VFL games absolutely carry weight, and they absolutely follow players around.

If anything, the VFL is where habits get formed. How a player contests the ball, how they play on the edge, whether they know where the line is — all of that is being watched by senior coaches, selectors, and yes, the MRO. A young bloke who gets tagged as someone with poor technique or a temper in the twos is going to face extra scrutiny when he gets his senior opportunity.

It’s a point that gets made in football circles all the time but bears repeating: the football you play in the VFL is your audition. Every game. Every contest.

What Happens After the Tribunal

Once the Tribunal hands down its findings, the player and the club have to decide how to respond. If the player has been found guilty and handed a suspension, they can accept it, serve the ban, and get back to work. Or they can appeal — though that takes the matter to the Appeals Board, which is yet another layer of process that, again, I have more familiarity with than I ever wanted.

Honestly? Most of the time the sensible move is to accept the outcome, take the medicine, and come back focused. The players who handle these situations best are generally the ones who don’t let it fester, who don’t spend their ban stewing, and who come back with something to prove. The players who handle it worst are the ones who feel hard done by and let that feeling eat into their game.

The young Saint — and at this point we’re talking about someone still building their career — would do well to take whatever the Tribunal decded, learn from it, and move on. That’s the footy version of a lesson in how to cop one on the chin.

The Bigger Picture for St Kilda

From a Saints perspective, this is a relatively minor disruption in the scheme of things. St Kilda have been rebuilding with genuine intent over the last few seasons, and the VFL program is a key part of that — it’s where they’re developing the depth that eventually powers a September run, or at least the hope of one.

A Tribunal case involving a developing player isn’t a crisis. It’s an inconvenience, and more importantly, it’s a teaching moment — both for the individual player and for the broader group. Football clubs are full of blokes watching what happens when one of their mates does something and faces consequences. The ripple effect is real.

Good clubs use these moments. They sit the group down, they talk about where the lines are, and they make sure the message lands. Whether St Kilda did that, I obviously don’t know — but the good ones always do.

Same System, Same Drama, Different Year

Every year there’s a young player who fronts a Tribunal for the first time. Every year there are direct referrals, surprise findings, strong opinions online, and the same cycle of outrage and acceptance. The system isn’t perfect — no system involving split-second human decisions ever could be — but it broadly does what it’s supposed to do.

And for what it’s worth, coming from someone who has watched his own club get run through this thing more times than I care to count: it’s survivable. The Tribunal is not the end of the world. It just feels like it at the time.

Good luck to the young fella. Learn from it. And welcome to a club that none of us asked to join.