To be clear, Higgins was concussed, spent the night in hospital and needed surgery. So we can cover off on the level of force threshold.
So how do we get to guidelines stating head clashes are reasonably foreseeable from a bump and an AFL ruling that the player could not have reasonably foreseen a head clash from a bump?
It's the term 'may be considered foreseeable' rather than 'will be considered foreseeable' that he has stuck to. The guidelines go on to say consideration of the level of impact in a bump that causes a head clash can consider the distance travelled, if it was excessive, if he left the ground and if he had alternatives.
Christian decided it was not excessive, he didn't travel far and didn't leave the ground. So from the distance he went and how hard he hit him he wouldn't have thought the heads would whiplash and hit. That's hard to accept.
He also had an alternative – he could have tackled.
The AFL changed the rules after Lindsay Thomas bumped Ben Reid in 2014 and the then Match Review Panel ruled, as Michael Christian did on Monday, that the head clash was accidental.
The AFL introduced the idea of the foreseebility of a head clash from the whiplash effect of a bump to the body to clarify this idea of accidental contact.
Christian also let Mark Le Cras off last week, for a bump that concussed Ben Ainsworth, because of the same logic that head clashes are accidental. I disagree with him on both.
You can have accidents in football, they happen all the time, but when you know that clashing heads is common from bump it is no longer accidental, it is likely.
One of the changes the AFL introduced in the off-season was to allow an appeal of their own MRO if they disagreed with the decision. This is one of those decisions.
Steve Hocking should appeal the Burton decision.
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Michael Gleeson is a senior AFL football writer and Fairfax Media's athletics writer. He also covers tennis, cricket and other sports. He won the AFL Players Association Grant Hattam Trophy for excellence in journalism for the second time in 2014 and was a finalist in the 2014 Quill Awards for best sports feature writer. He was also a finalist in the 2014 Australian Sports Commission awards for his work on Boots for Kids. He is a winner of the AFL Media Association award for best news reporter and a two-time winner of Cricket Victorias cricket writer of the year award. Michael has covered multiple Olympics, Commonwealth Games and world championships and 15 seasons of AFL, He has also written seven books – five sports books and two true crime books.
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