It may have been a holiday in Fremantle but there is no rest for the Victorian run Match Review Panel. To us it was Foundation Day, to them it was just another Monday and another chance to put a Fremantle player out of the game. This week Ryan Crowley was on the chopping block. He'd done something which looked a bit iffy but they still had to work pretty hard to take him down.
In another first for Fremantle, Crowley was charged under the controversial new rule of making forceful contact from front-on - but with a twist. Crowley didn't hit Prestigiacomo in the head, he hit him in the body ( and in the side at that but the match review panel struggle with abstract concepts like that).
Despite his super human effort to avoid hurting Prestigiacomo, the Match Review Panel declared his action reckless while being forced to concede it was low impact and body conduct. The numbers were fed into the computer and Dexter declared it worth a week suspension if he kept his mouth shut and two if he tried to clear his name and lost.
The result adds to the ever increasing list of parts of the human body the AFL consider sacrosanct. The head, the back, the thigh, the arms, the foot, the manboobs, the eyebrows and now the shoulder.
In a rare result against Fremantle's opposition, Alan Didak was given a week suspension for cowardly punching Paul Hasleby in his crook back.
