PORT Adelaide coach Mark Williams has instructed his players to tackle - not bump - leading into the start of the 2009 premiership season.

Last month, the AFL redefined the terms of the head-high contact rule after its Appeals Board overturned the four-week suspension handed to Collingwood skipper Nick Maxwell.

The overturned rough conduct charge, for a bump which left West Coast youngster Patrick McGinnity with a broken jaw, was the first time in 11 cases brought before the Appeals Board since the new AFL tribunal system was introduced in 2005 that a tribunal verdict has been set aside.

The rule now states that any contact to the head, whether intentional or accidental, will be subject to punishment.

Williams, who has been a strong advocate for protecting the head, said he had pushed for the AFL to ban the bump on a player trying to take possession of the ball.

“I’ve never seen too much reason to bump people,” Williams told portadelaidefc.com.au.

“In general, if a player has the ball you can tackle them and, if they haven’t got the ball, you can bump them. But I think now, you probably need to sweat on someone and wait until they take possession to tackle them.

“There may well be a move to eliminate the bump completely. I certainly pushed for the AFL to bring in the decision that anyone picking the ball up off the ground had to be tackled and not bumped.

“If people think through that, most of the head-high collisions would be completely eliminated."

Williams said the bump should also be outlawed for players coming off the centre square at restarts of play.

“You can always shepherd and, a lot of the time, a bump is a shepherd,” he said.
“You can still spread your arms out to stop someone’s progression towards one of your teammates. You don’t really need to bump them.”

Williams also argued that clubs should be able to use legal precedent in defending their players at the AFL tribunal.

He said he had no qualms with the League introducing some new rules, as long as the interpretation was always the same.

“One of my issues has always been that the AFL should have a DVD full of precedent to show everyone," Williams said.

"Any member of the public, any player, any coach and any commentator or media outlet can have a look at it, so it’s all the same and everyone knows the rules.

“Then it becomes very clear that one action means this and another means that. For instance, the bumping rule, the DVD could show you what penalty one particular bump attracts compared to another.

“And for the life of me I still can’t understand why we can’t use precedent in the AFL Tribunal.

"QCs and lawyers are used in the tribunal, as we’ve seen recently, so don’t talk to me about how we don’t want to bring lawyers and legal argument into it, because they’re already in it.”

One rule, currently on trial in the NAB Cup/Challenge competition, is a free kick being awarded for any deliberately rushed behind.

Williams said he was happy with how the rule had been enforced during the pre-season, but said players and coaches would always find new ways around it.

"There have been suggestions that players will kick the ball for ‘touch’, like in the rugby code, or kick the ball 50m out of bounds on the full to avoid rushing the behind and giving the opposition a direct shot on goal," the Port coach said.

“There will be some of those (tactics), but the reason we walked the ball through the points was because we could and, now that we can’t, we’ll find a different way,” he said.

“There will only be the rare case where you actually have to go back through the goals because you can always go some other way.

"It was just an easy outlet, an easy decision and gave you an easy rebound, which is why people did it.”