As expected, Peter Wright copped four weeks for his bump on Sydney’s Harry Cunningham, Wayne Carey’s self-imposed exile from watching football commenced and the sun came up. The dogs bark, the landscape changes, the standards shift and those with half a brain adjust accordingly.
That’s not to say men like Carey, Jonathan Brown and Leigh Matthews don’t have valuable insights to offer when it comes to these incidents. They were Teddy Roosevelt’s proverbial “men in the arena”, while we who merely opine on the game are “those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat”. They know better than anyone about split seconds, and about the tissue thin difference between the perfect mark and an act of thuggery. The lawyers, the administrators, the tweeters, the biomechanists and the journalists – we will never fully know what it’s like. They were there, and they deserve to be listened to.
