Whateley: Football has done Lachie Neale wrong

At what point I wonder across four and a half hours of evidence and deliberation and ten minutes of reasoning did last night’s Tribunal hearing reveal itself to be simply unfair.

The trial of a minor incident to maximum effect.

The determination, the fervour to rub Lachie Neale out of the Grand Final has been resolute from the outset and entirely lost on me.

On the scale of Preliminary Final incidents that have been tried or cleared this is barely a ripple.

In my time,

• We watched as Barry Hall was captured full frame thumping an opponent in the stomach before a two-week suspension was reduced to a reprimand.

• We saw Trent Cotchin leave a star opponent with concussion and never be asked to answer for the collision.

Neale was tried and convicted with the full force of the football law.

As I watched the frame-by-frame analysis of the grainy vision I can’t have been the only one wondering what on earth we were doing.

Perhaps it was the moment when it was conceded during the testimony that the blurry vision would be difficult to see on your screen.

Or maybe it was when the admission came that you could not identify the moment when Neale’s fist was in Jack Ginnivan’s abdomen.

Likely it was when a 320-game career without suspension, who has twice earned the honour as the competition’s fairest and best, did not qualify for the provision afforded an exemplary record.

Had you listened to the gravity of the finding you would have mistaken Neale’s action for an egregious assault – a king hit from a previous era.

He hunted down an unsuspecting victim and assailed him, rather than an arm swing that had no lasting impact whatsoever on Ginnivan who it was acknowledged saw it coming.

The Hawk fell to the ground, grinned, rose and trotted off completely unimpaired.

I wonder if the vision had been of an acceptable quality, never mind definitive, if this is what it would have shown.

The Tribunal convinced itself of the opposite and dismissed all on Neale’s testimony.

The Lion midfielder had delivered a cohesive and plausible explanation that challenged the vision to prove otherwise.

But the onus was applied the other way.

Bizarrely the Tribunal found this was a forceful blow, delivered with a swinging arm and an open hand.

So just to be clear, the Tribunal itself found this wasn’t a gut punch.

How it could possibly determine an open hand rather than a clenched fist will remain one of life’s great mysteries.

But what it isn’t is consistent with the vision… as was repeatedly claimed.

Suppositions and extrapolations outweighed the burden of proof and the consequences of the finding.

This was the perfect companion to the Zak Butters case staged earlier this season, a week-long fiasco without the requisite audio.

There is little sympathy for Neale because he’s being tried in the public arena as a love rat rather than a champion footballer.

He has conducted himself poorly throughout the year from his private circumstances to his brazen efforts to join Collingwood.

There’s a relish for him to be punished and the mob has been sated.

I see it’s even been claimed as a win for football.

What tosh.

Football has done Lachie Neale wrong.

We’ll look back one day and wonder if it wasn’t all spectacularly unfair – Neale alongside Carl Ditterich, Neville Crowe and Phil Carman.

The last hope is it gets corrected at appeal.