The tribunal said he should've tackled. Pretty hard to do that when Aish hadn't yet taken possession of the ball.
Did you see the Sam Wicks incident las night? Jumped, extended forearm, and hit a Brisbane player in the head after he disposed the ball. Has to be at least 3 weeks if not 4 based on precedent. Let's see.
Just looked at the Sam Wicks incident now. I am presuming Lester was not concussed. This just looks like an old fashioned strike to the head and would have been weeks in any era of footy. It is also difficult to see how it would not be graded as deliberate conduct as well. It knocked Lester off his feet so should be high impact, high contact, deliberate conduct(you surely cannot do that action by careless accident.) So if it is careless he gets 2 weeks, deliberate he gets 3 weeks. So there we have it, a good old fashioned late strike to the head with forearm is worth equal to or less than what Mansell's brace in an unavoidable collision in a contest.
There should be some sort of loading for the act to be outside to laws of the game on 2 separate grounds: late contact(worth a free kick regardless of how legitimate the contact would otherwise be,) and a strike to the head, all completely voluntary on the part of Wicks. But the system does not allow for this. The system says if you are executing a perfectly legal action in the game and accidentally make contact with the head you get the same punishment as a player who is acting outside the rules of game, with a deliberate late bump or strike.
Any system of punishment that doesn't try to distinguish between guilt and innocence is rubbish. If I am driving a car and a tyre blows and the car through no fault of mine veers into oncoming traffic and someone is killed, the law does not automatically give me a sentence the same as if I recklessly chose to mount a pavement and killed a pedestrian, just because somebody died in both instances. But you would also not expect the law to punish me worse in the first instance if somebody died than the second instance if nobody died but somebody was injured. The main thing the law will consider is whether you are guilty or not guilty of an offence.
The AFL advocate's suggestions that Mansell could have slowed down or tackled were wilfully ignorant at best. It doesn't match up with his available choices given the reaction time limitations and the imperative of all footballers to contest the ball with maximum vigour. The Tribunal findings are also retrospectively overly onerous on the non-injured player in the collision, without placing a similar onus on the injured player. Everybody should be allowed to attack a loose ball at full speed, or nobody.
This system is a mess. The laws of the game need to be joined up with the desired outcomes, ie less concussions. Then proper weighting needs to be given to the guilt or otherwise of the actions in respect to the laws of the game.