Geelong star Patrick Dangerfield will miss three AFL games for his hit that left Adelaide’s Jake Kelly with a concussion and a broken nose.
The 2016 Brownlow medallist was cited for his bump on Kelly last weekend.
Dangerfield’s legal team pleaded guilty to rough conduct but challenged the grading of the impact, wanting it downgraded from “severe” to “high”.
Part of the defence from Dangerfield’s team was reading out definitions of the word “severe”, including the Oxford and Macquarie dictionaries, and asking Siri for a definition.
The jury only needed 18 minutes to come to the conclusion that the Match Review Officer’s initial grading for the level of the impact was correct.
Dangerfield’s legal team tried to draw a distinction between incidents where a player’s shoulder or arm hit a player in the head, as opposed to this bump, where the damage was caused by a head clash.
“Mr Dangerfield accepts that in the modern game when a player bumps another player they accept responsibility for the consequences,” Ben Ihle told the tribunal.
“He accepts there was accidental and incidental contact between their heads.”
Ihle also asked the jury not to put too much stock in the fact that Kelly ended up with a broken nose.
He said the nose was “sensitive and vulnerable” and the fact that it broke was not an indicator of the severity of the impact.
More to come.
