THE finding during the week by AFL Tribunal chairman David Jones, in the case of Rough Play against Geelong's Darren Milburn, is a mixed blessing for football. Jones altered the terms of the charge as it had been presented by the match review panel, pointing out that Milburn's contact with Richmond's Shane Edwards was to the body, not the head. Jones thus reduced Milburn's penalty, and suggested the AFL football operations department write a specific rule in relation to the sort of tackle Milburn had been charged with executing.

Milburn is lucky. The manner of his demolition of Edwards, 21 kilograms lighter than he, might have earned the approval of some of the game's old guard, but it was dangerous and it was late.

While lots of things that happen on the football field can cause injury — and that's part of the excitement of the game — it is the responsibility of those who administer the sport to constantly monitor it and ensure that dangerous practices at the edge of the rules are discouraged.

This one will be. The old guard that gave Milburn a tick for his slam tackle of Edwards will, in a few years from now, shake their heads disapprovingly whenever such tactics are employed. Just as an earlier old guard had to reluctantly accept that coathanger tackles and racism had no place in football, so will today's come to see that gratuitous tackles, applied well after they have done their job of dispossessing the ball-carrier, and designed purely to hurt and possibly injure, also have no place in the game.

Jones' finding in this case exposed a dismal lack of attention to this issue on the part of successive AFL football operations departments. The AFL has had at least 18 years to do something about it, for it's that long since the spear tackle was first raised as an issue in a match. Then, as now, it was apparent that the rules needed refining, yet in all that time, the AFL has failed to adequately deal with the problem.

In 1990, lantern-jawed Fitzroy ruckman John Ironmonger applied a spear tackle on Collingwood speedster Graham Wright in a match at Princes Park. It wasn't reported by the umpires, probably because on their interpretation of the laws, it wasn't a reportable offence. The AFL used its then somewhat loose video-reporting procedure to lay a charge of what was at that time called "Unduly Rough Play" against Ironmonger.

Unduly rough play was actually defined in the laws back then, unlike the generic rough play offence of today, as a "breach of the rules committed in a deliberate and violent manner". Although the matter of whether Ironmonger had committed any deliberate breach was highly arguable — the only breach he committed was holding the man and it wasn't clear whether he would have known just when Wright had lost possession of the ball — the tribunal gave him a two-week suspension and "fixed" the problem.

Subsequently, the reportable offence of unduly rough play has been changed to rough play, and no longer is there a definition assigned to it. The intent of this alteration, I suspect, was to allow incidents such as that involving Ironmonger and Wright, or that between Milburn and Edwards last Saturday night, to be viewed less analytically. That was, at least, until Adrian Anderson brought us trial by box-ticking a few seasons ago.

Justice-by-box-ticking was meant to deliver a process so gloriously simple that anyone could do it, everyone could understand it, and clubs and players would know just where they stood in the face of any charge of on-field misconduct. But things are rarely quite that simple.

Last Monday, the match review panel was forced to tick a box that would describe the part ofEdwards' anatomy on which Milburn had perpetrated rough play. Alas, both boxes in Adrian Anderson's puzzle were wrong.

Milburn's contact with Edwards was to the body, but that contact was legal. The Geelong player made no contact to Edwards' head; the contact was made by a sod of Telstra Dome turf. The panel may well have understood the impossibility of its position, but the system imposed from above compelled its members to make a choice. They ticked high contact and then had their assessment dismantled at the tribunal hearing.

It's not good enough. That a strong statement was required on the form of tackle executed by Milburn is clear to anyone who recognises that footballers have a duty of care in their treatment of opposition players. Yet the game was incapable of delivering it. There will continue to be uncertainty on the issue of tackles of this sort. The AFL's cute judicial system has failed the game.

There was, though, a positive side to Tuesday night's outcome. Jones might have felt a temptation to deliver pragmatic justice in the Milburn case, as Neil Busse's tribunal had done with Ironmonger , and found a way of endorsing the match review panel's finding. That he didn't, and thus embarrassed and put the onus on the AFL, is a healthy outcome. The tribunal was acting independently, exactly as it should.