Whateley put all the hard-hitting Petracca questions to AFL footy boss Laura Kane - here's what she said

In the wake of Gerard Whateley’s call for the AFL and Melbourne Football Club to be held to account in regard to Christian Petracca’s injury management from King’s Birthday, AFL EGM Laura Kane joined SEN’s Crunch Time to discuss the matter.

Petracca’s season is over but he was sent back onto the ground in the second term of Melbourne’s eventual loss on Monday.

The revelation of the extent of his injuries has shocked the footy world, although the AFL has ticked off on Melbourne’s process.

Whateley and Kane discussed all the fallout, read the full transcript below.

GW: Processes were specifically examined and cleared in the handling of that incident on Monday?

LK: The whole thing from when he came off the field to understanding what the conversation was. But we backed in the processes quite early.

Although it's a really poor outcome for him, and I hope he's OK, I hope he recovers quickly, I know it would be a real shame for him to miss the back half of the season, it was relatively stock standard in terms of symptoms, changing a player, having a contact injury, trying to push through, and then not being able to.

GW: So 21.5 minutes on the field (after the injury), Andrew Dillon used the phrase yesterday, ‘As soon as the doctors saw he wasn't travelling well…’, should he have been removed from the field as soon as it was clear that he wasn't travelling well?

LK: Well, I think you can examine… I mean, I've sat on a bench for seven or eight years. I was on bench during that game, during that quarter and watched it up close.

I think you can pick apart minutes and seconds and processes. I think ultimately the player comes to the doctor has a conversation, there's a clinical assessment and says, ‘I'm no good. I'm in pain, you know?’ Pain relief, if that was given, hasn't worked. This applies to all contact injuries, and at some point, the symptoms changed and he had to go off to hospital.

GW: So is it at all troubling that Collingwood players in real time out on the field realised that he was no good and spoke to him specifically about it while there was no intervention?

LK: Oh, we don't want players to be that sore onfield, you know, noticeable by their own teammates or, in fact, others.

But I'm sure it's not the first time, and I don't think it will be the last (of) players try to push through and, you know, you see players try and battle through different injuries and pain, and they are trying to do the best for their teammates and their fans. But clearly it's not something that we want to see.

GW: So with the perfection of hindsight, was it troubling that he was on the ground with a Grade 5 rupture of the spleen?

LK: Knowing the outcome… It's troubling, but I think that could apply to anything.

It's just that it's an internal injury that we clearly don't want players to suffer. We clearly don't want him to miss the back half of the season.

And, yes, (it is) troubling that he has an internal injury to that degree, but not troubling that we don't know it at the time. We can't see it at the time. And the clinical assessment that was conducted both when he came off the first time and throughout the quarter was normal process on a footy field.

GW: So it was not foreseeable that given the excruciating pain that he was in and that opposition players could see that was abnormal out on the field, it wasn't foreseeable that this was an escalating scenario?

LK: That's what the doctors are looking for, so their emergency management training is when do the symptoms… I mean, imagine a patient. Imagine you go to the doctor and you articulate to your doctor what's wrong. If you go back the next day and said it got worse, if you go back half an hour later and said’ it's worse, it's more painful, I can't push through’, once those symptoms change, there are triggers.

You can imagine a list of things the doctors are waiting to hear and when they start to hear some particular symptoms, it might indicate that something's more wrong and that something needs more attention or different attention.

GW: Didn't they miss those signals along the way?

LK: The process was OK. The clinical assessment by the doctors was standard. Christian's an extremely experienced player. 1He's extremely in touch with his own body and his performance, as are most of our players, so we're comfortable and as are Melbourne.

GW: The Brisbane Lions told us last night that they'd reassessed their processes in light of what happened.

They wouldn't say that they were critical of Melbourne, but they've used the moment to make sure, between the medical staff and the coaching staff, that that scenario wouldn't play out for them.

I feel like that should be led by the AFL, but would you hope that clubs would think through that themselves?

LK: Our clubs are always trying to get better. I remember when I was in a footy program, you'd watch and you'd follow things that would happen over a weekend. You'd follow processes, good and bad, and you would learn from them and you would talk about them and you would say, ‘How can we learn from this, is there something that we would do differently, uunderstand differently, do we have a process that could be improved as a result of what we've seen’?

But we've got some of the best doctors in the world. We've got some of the best sports physicians in the world that are top of their field, making unbelievable decisions and lots of them, by the way, during a game of footy.