Five Strikes and You’re Out, Suns — The AFL Finally Cracks Down

Five times. The Gold Coast Suns have been pinged for careless contact with an umpire five separate times in a single season, and the AFL has finally responded with a fine that, by all accounts, is not the kind of number you’d want landing on your desk on a Monday morning.

Now look, I’m a Carlton man — have been since before half the Suns’ playing list was born — and I’ve seen the Blues cop their share of hefty penalties from head office over the years, so I’m not here to throw stones purely on tribal grounds. But even setting my navy-blue heart aside for a moment, five incidents in one season is a pattern, not a coincidence, and the game’s administrators were right to come down hard.

What Actually Happened Here

The AFL handed down a substantial financial sanction to the Suns after the club accumulated its fifth instance this season of a player making careless contact with a field umpire. Each individual incident on its own might be explained away as heat-of-the-moment stuff, a stray arm, a shoulder that swings a fraction too wide in a contest — and to be fair, the word careless is doing a lot of work in that charge sheet, because nobody is seriously suggesting these blokes are deliberately bowling over the men in yellow. But five times? You start to wonder what they’re teaching at training, and more to the point, what the football department has been doing in response to incidents two, three and four before it got to this point.

The AFL confirmed the fine and cited the club’s accumulation of incidents across the season as the basis for the escalated penalty. That’s the process working as it should, even if it took until round whatever-we’re-up-to for it to bite properly.

Back in My Day, You Just Didn’t Go Near the Umpire

I know, I know — every column I write eventually gets here. But hear me out, because this one is genuinely relevant. When I was growing up watching the VFL, the understanding among players was bone-deep and non-negotiable: you do not lay a finger on the umpire. Not because of a fine schedule. Not because a welfare officer at head office was tracking incidents on a spreadsheet. You just didn’t. The social contract of the game made it unthinkable.

Back in my day the umpires weren’t perfect — Lord knows there were plenty of howlers that had my old man hurling his program in the air at Princes Park — but the idea of a player bumbling into one and it becoming a club-wide cultural issue would have been incomprehensible. Somewhere along the way, in all the tinkering and the rule rewrites and the player empowerment seminars and the whatever-else, that unspoken code got a bit blurry. And that, to me, is the real story underneath this fine.

Is the Suns’ Club Culture the Problem?

I want to be careful here because I’m not in their meetings and I’m not in their coaches’ box, so I’ll put it as a question rather than a verdict. But you’d have to ask: is there something systemic at the Suns that allowed this to happen five times before the club cleaned it up internally?

\p>Any well-run football club — and there are a few of them left, I maintain — should have pulled its players into a room after incident number two and said, in no uncertain terms, that this stops now. The fact that it got to five before a fine large enough to sting came down suggests either the internal messaging wasn’t strong enough, or it wasn’t landing with the playing group. Neither is a great look.

To be fair to Gold Coast, they’re a young club built around a lot of young blokes, and exuberance in the heat of a contest is part and parcel of that. But youth isn’t an excuse by game five of the same problem. It’s a coaching and leadership issue at that point, and I’d be surprised if Damien Hardwick doesn’t address it with some considerable forthrightness in the coming weeks.

The AFL’s Escalation System — Does It Work?

Here’s where I’ll give the game’s administrators a small amount of credit, which those of you who read me regularly will know I dispense about as freely as a miser with his last shilling. The escalating-penalty model for repeated umpire contact does, in theory, make sense. You fine lightly for an isolated incident, you fine more heavily as the pattern develops, and eventually the number on the invoice becomes impossible to ignore.

The question — and it’s a fair one — is whether the earlier interventions were stern enough to actually deter a fourth and fifth incident. If the first three fines were the sort of thing a club just writes off as the cost of doing buiness in a contested, physical game, then the early rungs of the ladder aren’t serving their purpose. A deterrent only works if it actually deters. And plainly, for the Suns, it didn’t deter quickly enough.

I’d argue the AFL might want to look at making the second and third incidents sting a bit harder than they apparently do. But then again, I also reckon there are about forty-seven rules in this modern game that could be simplified or ditched entirely, so perhaps my opinion on regulatory design isn’t the most balanced you’ll find.

What the Umpires Deserve

Let me say something that I think gets lost in these conversations, because they tend to become all about the dollar figure and the club’s reputation and the media cycle: the umpires deserve better.

These are people — volunteers at the lower levels, and even at the elite level, not exactly footballers’ union members in terms of the protections and the support — who are out there making split-second calls in front of fifty thousand people who are largely hostile to their existence. Their job is hard. Their job makes enemies. And the minimum they should be able to expect is that a player in the heat of a contest keeps enough awareness to not career into them.

I’ll criticise umpiring decisions until the cows come home — it’s my right as a paying, long-suffering Carlton supporter, and I exercise it enthusiastically — but criticising decisions and tolerating physical contact are two entirely different things. The former is a healthy part of footy culture. The latter is not, and it never should have been.

Gold Coast Need to Fix This Themselves

The fine has been handed down, the dollars will be deducted, and no doubt there will be the standard club statement expressing that they take the matter seriously and have processes in place to address it. Fine. Standard procedure.

But the real fix has to come from inside Carrara. Hardwick and his leadership group need to instil in those young men the same instinct that players of previous generations carried without even thinking about it: the umpire is off-limits, full stop, no exceptions, no grey areas. You might disagree with his decision. You might think it was the worst call since that infamous VFL final I’d rather not revisit. But you keep your hands and your body to yourself.

It’s not complicated. It’s not even a new rule — it’s one of the oldest understandings in Australian football. The Suns have five incidents on the board in 2024 as proof that somewhere, somehow, that message got diluted. The AFL’s fine is a consequence. The cultural reset needs to be the cure.

And if it takes until next season for us to look back and see this as the moment Gold Coast tightened things up properly, then at least something useful will have come from a fairly embarrassing chapter in their short history as a VFL — sorry, AFL — club. Some habits, it turns out, are worth keeping.