Opinion
The Rankine rule: How to close the loophole that helps a losing side
Waleed Aly
Columnist, author and academicSo, Izak Rankine will be available to play this year’s AFL grand final. Or maybe he won’t be.
Put simply, should Adelaide proceed in straight sets – winning their qualifying final and then earning the following week off – Rankine’s season will be over. If Adelaide takes the scenic route, having lost in week one and playing every remaining week, he might become a premiership player.
Izak Rankine’s only chance of playing in this year’s finals is if the Crows lose one.Credit: AFL Photos
This is perverse. If we assume Rankine’s presence boosts Adelaide’s chances on grand final day, it means the Crows will be better off having lost along the way than having cleared every hurdle.
To be abundantly clear, that’s no incentive for Adelaide to drop their first final. The added peril of an extra sudden-death final, and the loss of a home prelim is a serious blow. But it is perverse nonetheless that once the biggest day arrives, Adelaide would have been punished at the selection table for winning, and rewarded for losing en route.
We could shrug, mark this down as a mere quirk of circumstance, and move on. After all, I cannot think of another instance like this, where someone in a top-four team receives a mid-term suspension on the eve of the finals that happens to land in such an exquisitely ambiguous way.
But that doesn’t mean it won’t happen again. Perhaps once, three-to-five week suspensions were rare, triggered by something akin to a punch. But now – especially in the age of concussion and vilification – the range of offences has broadened, and the MRO grid puts such suspensions more frequently in play.
Accordingly, the chances of the Rankine scenario occurring again are only increasing. It’s therefore worth thinking about how we might avoid this absurdity.
In that spirit, allow me to sketch a proposal.
It begins with the general rule that where a team earns a week off that week counts as a match for suspension purposes. The key word here is “earns”. It does not apply to byes, or postponements, or anything similarly passive.
Applied to Rankine, it would mean he’d be eligible for the grand final. If that troubles you, it’s an argument for a longer suspension. But it’s not an argument for one whose consequences get better if his team loses a game in his absence.
The proposal stands, whether you think Rankine should have gotten three weeks or seven.
I admit I can see one serious drawback. This is where a player gets a one-match suspension in a winning qualifying final. Applied strictly, my proposal could mean he serves no suspension at all. The simplest fix would be to rule that a suspension begins at the team’s next match.
But Waleed! Doesn’t that mean his team is still being disadvantaged at selection by winning: losing a player for a preliminary final when, had they lost, it would be a semi-final?
Well, yes, in a sense. But it’s a more marginal difference than the Rankine situation.
Either way, the player misses one sudden-death match on the road to the ultimate prize. If it’s a choice between absurdities, I’d much rather live with that smaller one. And if a side must be disadvantaged at selection for earning a week off, it seems best for that to happen when the suspension comes in the very process of earning it. Arguably, it’s fair for that suspension to reduce the benefit of the win.
All this is a smaller tweak than it seems. It really only applies to four teams and covers one week. But that week happens to be among the most important of the year and, in the current case, affects the biggest one of all. In my view, that’s what makes it worth considering. There’s a sleeping issue here and, if Adelaide lives up to its seeding this September, we might just see it awaken.
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