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Find your frequency hereLyon: The element of Shiel’s suspension we must not overlook
Andrew Slevison • August 13th, 2025 11:34 am
Essendon’s Dylan Shiel was suspended for one match for his push on Geelong’s Mark O’Connor.
In a divisive case, the AFL Tribunal opted to ban the veteran Bomber after the shove on his Cats opponent resulted in teammate Luamon Lual falling awkwardly.
It was a potentially nasty incident which was caused by Shiel’s push in the first place. Many will say - ‘how can you be suspended for hurting a teammate?’ - but the AFL sees the overall issue as the action itself.
SEN’s Sam Edmund explained what was said as the Tribunal reached their verdict on Shiel.
“They took nearly two hours to find Shiel guilty. They did emerge to say ‘the forceful push on O’Connor was unreasonable in the circumstances, it was not contact that a reasonable player would consider prudent and he breached his duty of care by pushing O’Connor in the way he did’,” Edmund said on SEN Breakfast.
“Supporters of this will say, ‘Good, it’s dangerous, it’s crept into the game and we hate the look of it’. Then the haters of it will say, ‘Shiel has been suspended for a push in the back’. This is where we’ll get both sides.”
To which Garry Lyon responded swiftly: “They’d be wrong.
“Pushed in the back is one part of what happened. Pushed in the back into oncoming traffic and putting the player (O'Connor) in an uncontrollable and dangerous situation (is the other).”
Before Edmund added: “So do we need to close the loophole officially come the end of the season?”
Lyon replied: “Of course.”
Lyon says the focus should not centre on the fact Lual was hurt, it should centre on O’Connor being placed in a dangerous situation. That is the element that should not be overlooked.
He referenced previously unsuspended incidents involving Collingwood’s Brody Mihocek and Richmond’s Nick Vlastuin, who was uninjured by an oncoming Jamie Elliott, and West Coast’s Reuben Ginbey pushing Tigers young gun Sam Lalor into Sandy Brock, resulting in a broken jaw.
“This wasn’t about Lual in the end, because the whole build-up was, ‘How can you get suspended if you injure your player (teammate)?’. So they’ve put that to bed,” Lyon continued.
“It was about putting Mark O’Connor into a dangerous situation and they upped the level of contact to high so they could get a one-game suspension.
“I’m not sure if it was high but the action itself deserves to be suspended, and the problem is Brody Mihocek should have been suspended three weeks ago in the Richmond game and he didn’t.
“Reuben Ginbey should have been suspended right at the start of the year, and maybe we wouldn’t be dealing with this.”
Richmond’s Rhyan Mansell copped a three-game ban for a very similar incident against St Kilda earlier this year when Liam O’Connor was concussed by an onrushing Tom Lynch.
Cases either side of that one have been shrouded in controversy and inconsistency, graded and judged very differently on each occasion.
