I SAW someone I know stabbed to death this week. In cold blood, in front of all his friends. Then the curtain fell, and Verdi's opera The Masked Ball was over. Very good show, too.

The previous week, in a public place, a fellow swore royally and made all manner of obscene gestures. Many people saw it. The Comedy Festival can be like that.

Then, at the weekend, I watched as one schoolboy poked another in the eye, inadvertently, with painful consequences. And they say basketball is a non-contact sport.

Following the logic applied by some this week, in all three instances, the police should have been called in, charges laid, a court convened. Assault, indecent language and behaviour, murder most foul, all against the law. The authorities had to step in or civil society would fall apart.

The murder charge might not have proceeded, since the deceased got up and soon was enjoying a glass of a particularly fine red. But bodily harm and lewdness: the accused were caught red-handed.

So, some said, the NSW constabulary had failed by not clapping Barry Hall in manacles the instant he left the field at the SCG last Saturday night.

The least charge was assault, and — since several experts were found to say that the punch he landed on Brent Staker could have killed — really, it ought to have been attempted murder. A man had a right to better protection than that in his workplace.

But these calls for the intervention of the courts, although well-meant, are fundamentally misguided. A sports field is a workplace like no other. On it, players — workers — by tacit agreement suspend all rules of civilian behaviour, for our sake and theirs. We do not just tolerate it, we expect it. We expect assault.

If a man was to bump another deliberately while walking down a footpath, he would be liable to a charge. If he was even to THREATEN to bump him, he would be liable. Almost the first action of one footballer as he lines up on another is to bump him. When the ball comes near, his attention becomes even more vigorous.

If one takes possession of the ball, the other sets upon him with all the delicacy and solicitude of the Hound of the Baskervilles.

Experts-on-call say Hall's punch could have killed. But almost every type of impact on the football ground can kill, and has. It is this verity that validates courage, perhaps the most admired sporting virtue. There is not a footballer alive who has not been afraid out there.

This is the nature and essence of contact sport. To a degree, it is the nature and essence of NON-contact sport; think of a batsman facing a bouncer. Tacitly, sportsfolk accept an arbitrary set of rules that temporarily exempt them from everyday life and without which no game could be played.

Far from making the sports ground the province of thugs and outlaws, it establishes that sport can be only for the especially highly trained and disciplined. Footballers launch themselves at each other with maniacal fury, yet almost always desist instantly at the blowing of a whistle.

We applaud the fury; it shows that they care as much as we do. But we also applaud, in the face of that fury, the self-discipline to stop on cue.

Hall broke all the rules, written and unwritten. His punch was a disgrace, a blight, a coward's act. Add your own adjective; most have, including Hall. He has been dealt with by the game's judiciary, and that is how it should be. To take him to court would be to hold him accountable in one realm for an offence committed in another.

As much as Hall took leave of his senses, so did nearly everyone else. In the tribunal, media and public, reaction was characterised as hysteria. Six matches, 10, a season, life: it became a bidding war.

Reflexively, the AFL was blamed, in the way governments are always blamed. This was unthinking. However else it fails, the league has worked hard to rid the game of gratuitous violence. Most weeks, the AFL is accused of sanitising the game; now, suddenly, it is for mongrels, snipers and thugs. Both cannot be right.

Truthfully, it is 20 years since this type of act was commonplace, 25 since it was admired. But times have changed: reportedly, when a replay was shown on the SCG scoreboard last Saturday night, even Swans fans booed Hall.

Elsewhere, hypocrisy has a field day. Even as Hall's haymaker was deplored as a bad example, it was replayed constantly. I didn't see Hall's punch in the moment that he threw it, and chose not to watch it until sitting in the tribunal.

To have cast around for it would have been somehow to authenticate it. I preferred The Masked Ball. At least I knew the victim would get up.