Kolodjashnij’s Retirement Should Shame More Than Just Geelong

Jake Kolodjashnij has been forced out of the game he loves at an age when a bloke should still be arguing with his coach about game plan, not filling out medical retirement paperwork. If you want the whole sorry story of what modern footy has done to itself, you could do worse than start right here.

I’ll say this plainly before the Cats people start ringing up complaining about bias: this isn’t a dig at Geelong. I’d happily needle the Cats over just about anything else, the flags, the recruiting, that whole era of them ambushing the comp with blokes nobody outside Victoria had heard of. But this one’s bigger than club colours. This one’s about what we’re doing to players’ heads, and about a governing body that still, after everything, hasn’t got its story straight.

A Premiership Player, Gone Too Soon

Kolodjashnij was a premiership defender, a bloke who did the unglamorous work that never gets you on the highlights reel but wins you flags all the same. He was also, whether he liked it or not, the name everyone attached to the concussion waiver saga that had the whole competition squirming a year or two back. Whatever you make of the ins and outs of that mess, and there was plenty of finger-pointing to go round, the upshot now is the same for him as it is for too many others: forced out, medically retired, career finished by the one injury this game still can’t get its head around, pardon the pun.

Back in my day — and I know, I know, here he goes again — you got a whack, you had a lie down in the rooms, somebody waved a bit of cotton wool under your nose and you were back out there before quarter time was up. We used to think that was toughness. Took us far too long to work out it was closer to negligence. So don’t read this as me pining for the old ways on this one, because on head knocks the old ways were flat out dangerous and I’m glad we’ve moved past them, mostly.

The Waiver Scandal That Never Got Properly Sorted

What gets my blood up is that we had all the noise about the concussion waiver business, statements from the club, statements from the league, protocols reviewed, promises made, and yet here we are again with a good player retiring because his brain simply couldn’t take any more. If the whole point of a review was to stop this happening, and it’s happened anyway, then somebody somewhere hasn’t done their job properly.

I don’t for a second reckon Geelong sat in a room plotting to put a bloke’s health second. That’s not how I read it and it’s not fair to suggest it. But you can be fair-minded about intentions and still say the system around these decisions — the waivers, the medical sign-offs, the pressure that comes from needing your best defender out there in September — is clearly not fit for purpose. Plenty of footy people have said as much, and you don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist to think the settings are wrong when a career ends like this one has.

Where’s Head Office in All This?

This is where I get my proper grumble on, because it’s always the same pattern with the AFL. Big review, big press conference, lots of talk about duty of care, and then twelve months later it’s like nothing happened and we’re back to arguing about six-six-six and interchange caps instead. The concussion protocols have been tinkered with more times than my old ute’s carburettor, and about as successfully.

You’d think an organisation with the resources of head office could settle on a policy and actually enforce it uniformly, rather than leaving clubs to interpret waivers and medical clearances however suits the run home. Instead we get rule changes rushed through mid-season, guidelines that read like they were drafted by committee at three in the morning, and a genuine crisis — players’ brains, for heaven’s sake — treated with the same bureaucratic shuffle as a dispute over guernsey numbers.

What This Means For The Next Bloke

Here’s my worry, and it’s not really about Kolodjashnij anymore because his footy’s done and I hope he has a long, healthy, happy life away from the game that gave him a lot and took plenty too. My worry is the next kid coming through, the next fringe player desperate to hold his spot, who cops a knock and feels the unspoken pressure to say he’s fine because that’s what gets you picked. The waiver system, whatever shape it ends up taking, has to protect that bloke from himself as much as from anyone pushing him back out there.

Clubs will always feel the pull of the contest, the flag, the finals spot. That’s footy, that’s competitive sport, I understand it and I don’t begrudge anyone wanting to win. But somebody independent of all that needs the final say on head injuries, and it can’t be a system where a club and a player and a doctor are all trying to balance medical advice against premiership windows. That’s not a fair fight for the player, not by a long shot.

Old-school toughness got plenty of blokes into trouble they’re only paying for now. We owe it to the current lot not to repeat the mistake with a different set of paperwork.

A Bit Of Respect Where It’s Due

For all my grumbling about the system, I don’t want that to overshadow the bloke at the centre of it. A premiership medal is a premiership medal, and nobody can ever take that off him or diminish what he gave to that famous flag. Cats supporters will remember him fondly and rightly so, and I’ll bet plenty of Carlton people, myself included on a good day, would admit he was a genuinely hard defender to play against.

Retiring through medical necessity is a rotten way for any career to finish, and it should be a wake-up call rather than a one-week story that gets buried under trade period gossip. The competition’s got a duty here that goes well beyond one club’s saga, and if the AFL wants to actually earn back some trust on this issue rather than just talking about it, this is exactly the moment to show it. Otherwise we’ll be back here again in a year or two, wondering why another good player’s had his career cut short by the same old problem nobody quite fixed.

Get well, Jake. And head office, for once, do your actual jorb.