GEELONG great Jimmy Bartel wants the Match Review Panel to have a greater ability to distinguish between football and non-football acts to help stamp out blatant jumper and gut punches.
One week after Richmond captain Trent Cotchin dodged suspension for a jumper punch on Fremantle's Lachie Neale, a number of players pushed the boundaries in North Melbourne's win over Melbourne on Sunday.
Multiple players, including Kangaroo Ben Cunnington, are expected to be scrutinised by the MRP on Monday, but precedent suggests all jumper and gut punches will escape with financial sanctions.
Bartel, who is a new member of the panel this year, said the table of offences that the MRP uses to grade indiscretions typically did not allow for "non-football acts" to be penalised more harshly.
"[The table of offences] has become so small that they're all lumped in together," Bartel said on RSN.
"You could get a week for a sling tackle, because you've got to go through the boxes, but you could get a week for punching.
"It would be great if you had something called football acts and non-football acts.
"By that I mean when you're trying to execute a football act and something goes wrong, like we talk about sling tackles and shepherding and spoiling, it's graded in a certain way.
"Things like punching are not a part of our game."
For a gut punch to be penalised with a one-match suspension, the MRP needs to grade it as medium impact under the table of offences that was revised by former football operations manager Mark Evans ahead of the 2015 season.
Jumper punches, meanwhile, are often graded as careless acts rather than intentional, resulting in financial sanctions, or insufficient force escaping penalty altogether.
Bartel said there would have been outrage whichever way the MRP graded Cotchin's jumper punch in round nine.
"People thought he should have got a week, and they reflect back to Tom Hawkins last year, and people were outraged that he got a week," Bartel said.
"So there was no winning on that decision. If we had given him a week we would have had just as many people saying he should have got a fine."
