The sub needs to disappear and never come back

As we embark on another round of football, whatever you do, please keep poor Ben Miller in your thoughts.

What the young Tiger endured last week you wouldn’t wish upon your worst enemy.

Miller is now facing a lengthy period of rehabilitation and a long road back to senior footy after suffering his serious injury.

Well, that’s how this article would’ve started if the AFL’s sub rule wasn’t being rorted by almost every club.

But now that this writer has extracted his tongue from his cheek, he is happy to report that there is actually nothing wrong with Miller.

During Richmond’s tense draw with Fremantle last Friday night, he was subbed out with what Tigers coach Damien Hardwick described as a “fully body cramp”.

Sounds pretty nasty! Thank goodness Richmond had the speedy Maurice Rioli Jr as a substitute to enter the game and provide much-needed fresh legs late in the contest. What a coincidence that was.

But then later in the night, the Herald Sun was told it was a groin injury. Sounds like the Tigers were struggling to get their story straight.

During the week, the charade was up. Richmond didn’t even bother putting Miller on their injury list, and the 22-year-old has kept his place in the team to face the Brisbane Lions in their crunch clash at the MCG on Sunday.

And the thing is, Richmond actually aren’t to be blamed for what they did. They were perfectly within their right to abuse the sub rule. Pretty much every other club has done the same thing. It has become a joke this year.

This writer never liked it from the get-go. When it was introduced on the eve of the 2021 season at the behest of the clubs, it was originally meant to be purely a concussion sub, but then it turned into a medical sub, and that’s when essentially the green light was given for every club to exploit it.

While players who are subbed out with concussion are automatically unavailable for a minimum of 12 days as they enter concussion protocols, players with non-concussion injuries can be subbed out if “it is reasonably determined the player will be medically unfit to participate in any match for at least the next 12 days”.

The league couldn’t have implemented a greyer area open to interpretation if it tried.

This year alone, 29 players who were subbed out one week played the next.

And that’s not to say each case was a clear-cut example of rorting the rule. There would definitely be times where it would be hard to determine whether a player would likely be unavailable the following week.

But therein lies the issue. We will never fully know which subs were legitimate and which subs were not.

Surely, it’s in the AFL’s interest to eliminate as much scepticism and cynicism from the average fan’s mind as it can?

This writer has long called for the sub rule to be scrapped in place of a five-man interchange bench, and during the week Western Bulldogs coach Luke Beveridge said the same thing.

Didn’t GWS obliterate Carlton by over 100 points with 17 men a few years back?

— Ronny Lerner (@RonnyLerner) March 28, 2022