Cochrane: AFL can’t be judge and jury in Geelong “train wreck”

Tony Cochrane has called for an independent inquiry into the Geelong concussion waiver saga.

The former Gold Coast Suns chairman says the AFL cannot be both judge and jury on this case given the presence of Chairman of the AFL Commission, Craig Drummond, who was Cats president at the time.

Cochrane spoke with SEN’s Gerard Whateley on Tuesday morning regarding the Jake Kolodjashnij clause, describing it as a “train wreck”.

“Let me start by saying, I think neither I nor probably nearly anybody other than perhaps the Geelong board and a handful of people at Geelong really know all the facts here at this stage,” Cochrane said on SEN’s Whateley.

“So the first thing I would say is I think for everyone's sake now we need a completely independent inquiry held into this.

“The AFL can't be judge and jury here. That's not sustainable and no one's going to, well, very few will take that as being a genuine search and seek mission on this.

“I don't have any ideas who that would be. There’s plenty of very clever judges and ex-judges and what have you in the state of Victoria, I'm sure they can come up with somebody who could conduct a completely independent inquiry into it.”

Whateley: Is that because essentially the AFL executive is going to pass judgment on something that materially affects the standing of the AFL chairman?

“100 per cent. The AFL can't now decide on this one,” Cochrane replied.

“If the current Chair of the Commission wasn't from the Geelong Football Club, it could, I guess. But no compromise completely.

“Probably the most important person in the rules and regulations and oversight of our game is the current Chair of the AFL Commission. The current Chair of the AFL Commission at the time that this incident occurred - we'll call it an incident for the moment - was the president of Geelong.

“So his position is so in question here that you've just got to park it from being an internal AFL anything. It's got to have some independence to it. How you choose to do that is up to smarter people than me, but you've got to have some independence.

“For the moment this has hit courtesy of some good journalistic work by Jay Clark. It's been at best a train wreck. Only diehard Geelong faithful would argue otherwise.”

Whateley: What did you think of the AFL and the Players' Association's initial attempts that I would describe as containment?

“Yes, well that's a very gracious description on your behalf,” he added.

“The first attempt by the AFL and the AFLPA to bury it - I would say, would be my words - with the classic, ‘Look, there's nothing to see here, let's all move on’. It just compounded the train wreck.

“It took it from a one or two-carriage event and made it into an eight-carriage event train wreck. So, I didn't wash with anybody. Everybody jumped on board within a matter of hours.

“So yeah, that was a terrible error. That was just a massive, massive error on everybody's behalf. Nobody should have swallowed that.”

Whateley: Part of the waiver or the acknowledgement of risk is now in the public domain, which you've read. How do you interpret it?

“Well, yeah, you're right, I think a lot of people have now got part of the copy of it which in itself is a problem because you don't get the full story and you don't have obviously all the facts that are at disposal here,” Cochrane said.

“But the waiver, or whatever terminology that they want to come up with, it's hard to see it in any other light other than it most definitely appears to break the AFL and very specifically rules around player engagement and player agreements.

“I will remember when I was on the board of the Gold Coast Suns way, way back, Travis Auld was our then CEO and he sat me down and took me through a number of very, very important things as far as AFL policy was concerned.

“I think mainly because he was concerned I came from a different sport (V8 Supercars) and obviously our sport was very differently structured and it was privately owned, so the structure was very different.

“I remember very clearly one of those rules that he thumped into me that day was as a club we cannot enter into any other agreement with a player without getting signed off of the AFL and the AFLPA. And it was fair enough, crystal clear, no ambiguity or no complexes that Geelong and our president at the time would have us believe now.

“Interesting word, complex.”

Whateley: To your eye and with your knowledge, there's no other way to read the document other than an alteration to the standard player contract?

“Look, I'm not a lawyer, but I don't think you would need much of a lawyer to say that it's anything but an alteration to the contract.

“There's a critical line in that document. It says, ‘Accordingly, you take upon yourself the physical and legal risk of loss, damage or injury of any kind arising directly or indirectly as a result of concussion sustained by you following your decision’.

“By the way, I'm not convinced that it's really in the long-term interest of the player either. In your 20s, you're not really thinking about your 40s, 50s and 60s. So I don't jump on the bandwagon and everybody says they were just trying to help the player. I don't think for the long-term good of the player they were helping too much.

“Parking that to one side. If you read that clause or that condition in that part of the correspondence we have seen that has become public, that is clearly, in my opinion, a definite breach.

“You are trying to adjust the rules under which teams operate, under which clubs operate, and how players are being treated. And as a bare minimum, if you say, ‘Look, I think what's happened here is, let's take Geelong's word, we've got a complex situation’. Well, if that was true and you were playing around the edges of the legal framework that our sport is prepared to work with, why wouldn't that give you even more reason to take it to the AFL and the AFLPA and say, ‘Look, we've got a complex situation here. Could we have some of your knowledge and your advice how we should handle this’.

“And in fact they did the opposite. For all intensive purposes they hid it.”

Cochrane added: “Under the rules that govern our game, it had to go back to the AFL and the AFLPA to simply be signed off.

“I don't see how you get around that point. I guess you can use the excuse of, ’We forgot, we all got busy, it got buried’.

“But you know, it is a pretty important part of the laws of our game. I just don't think you get a free pass in any of that.

“I think visibility over this decision was paramount and absolutely the AFL and the AFLPA should have had clear visibility to what was going to finally be put in place and signed.”

Listen to Whateley’s full chat with Cochrane below: