“We're not baying for blood”: What AFLPA boss is hoping to get from Petracca injury investigation

AFL Players’ Association CEO Paul Marsh has confirmed that an investigation is ongoing about the mismanagement of Christian Petracca’s injury on King’s Birthday against Collingwood.

Petracca was hospitalised in critical condition after suffering life-threatening internal injuries in a contest with Collingwood captain Darcy Moore including four broken ribs, a lacerated spleen and punctured lung.

The injuries cost Petracca the rest of his campaign and following that, the player and his family were left disgruntled with the club’s treatment of the injury and decision to send him back onto the ground which was among the reasons for the Demon to pursue a potential trade – which has since been shut down.

While Marsh’s pursuit of the truth has been labelled an investigation, the CEO says that he’s simply trying to understand exactly what happened to the Demon from all sides involved to help the industry improve going forward.

“I think maybe I'll just start with the word investigation. We're not an investigative body,” Marsh said on SEN Breakfast.

“I think that's been overplayed in terms of the role we might be playing, but in terms of trying to understand what's happened here … we’ve got a duty to try to make the game as safe as possible for our players and we worked in conjunction with the AFL and the clubs on that.

“We’re trying to understand what happened here to Christian and what we can learn from this moving forward, that is really what this is about.

“Obviously, it's been publicised that I've met with Christian. I'm not going to get into the details of that conversation other than to say, he is helping us understand this so we can look to the future.

“I think, from our perspective, it's about gathering the information from all sides, it’s not just hearing it from one side.

“It’s if this were to happen again, what are the lessons and what are the improvements that the industry could make?”

Marsh hopes that all involved are forthcoming with information in hopes of improving in case a similar situation arises in the future.

He is worried though that if those involved are defensive and not forthcoming they won’t be able to properly learn and move forward.

“There are probably broadly two paths this could take, one is that the industry could work together trying to understand what's happened here with a view to improvement,” Marsh said.

“But if the industry wants to take a defensive approach to this and not provide the information and actually work at how can we learn from this, then that may take a different path.

“We're at the point where I guess we've started on the players' side of this and there’s not just industry participants here, there’s outside medical people that are involved.

“We're just trying to get a 360 view of what happened and we're working through that at the moment.

“It's important, I think any industry should be looking at how it can improve, this could have gone a different way and let's not lose sight of that.

“It could have gone a different way and the reality of this is if we don't learn from this, then there's something wrong with our industry.”

As the AFL themselves have already cleared Melbourne and are satisfied everything was done correctly, Marsh was asked whether he’s expecting pushback from the club and the medical team as he conducts his own probe into exactly what happened.

“I guess we'll see how it plays out (if there’s pushback from Melbourne and their medical team), but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't go down a path of trying to understand what happened,” Marsh said.

“The AFL has obviously come out and said that they've cleared Melbourne, we're trying to understand on what basis that’s the case.

“We are concerned about how this has played out from a player's perspective, and I think on face value, we all should be concerned about what nearly happened here.

“What can we learn from this? We're not baying for blood here.

“What we're trying to do is understand what happened … we have to learn from these things because it's a high-risk sport at times.

“I think we've got to make sure that the medical support that sits around the players is as good as it can possibly be.”

Petracca’s situation became so dire following the incident that his partner was told there was a genuine chance he wouldn’t make it out alive given the internal bleeding.