FOOTBALLERS are rarely stood down indefinitely. They are slapped with fines. Or read the riot act. Or dragged into some chief executive's office and hauled over the coals and on the receiving end of furiously waved fingers, raised voices and threats of this being their last chance.
But on the rare occasions when they are banished to the sidelines, it inevitably follows that they have: a) consumed too much alcohol on a large night on the tiles; b) then fronted training the next morning believing nobody can smell the previous night's consumption on their breath; c) or the pure bourbon vapour seeping from their pores; d) that fills the coach's nostrils while the player is still sitting in his car, in the car park, wondering how the hell he's going to pull this off; e) when he knows full well this is his third and last last-chance warning; f) unless an injury crisis hits the club.
That's how it happens in rugby league, anyway. Not so at the Swans. They stand down players indefinitely for throwing a punch that didn't connect.
Big Bad Bazza Hall took a swing at Collingwood defender Shane Wakelin last Saturday night, and it missed by that much. If only West Coast's Brent Staker was so lucky in round four, when his chin found itself in the way of a Hall haymaker that earned the player a seven-match holiday.
Instead of receiving the scorn of the AFL masses on this occasion, Hall has been hung out to dry by his own club; put on ice until the Swans' resident psychologist, Grant Brecht, believes he is psychologically ready to resume playing. Presumably, this extraordinary step suggests Hall is on the verge of freaking right out and going postal. If it's not, his club is guilty of a very bizarre knee-jerk reaction. Either that or Brendan Fevola is coming to Sin City.
The Swans are an impressive, progressive football club. They have yoga sessions and leadership groups firmly in place. They've a forward-thinking coach in Paul Roos and a Buddhist captain in Brett Kirk who is on first-name terms with the Dalai Lama.
But what do the Swans truly expect from their players? What do they expect them to be? Footballers, across all codes, are often fuelled by anger and rage. They're instructed to rip and tear. To go hard at the pigskin. Throw themselves into the tackle. To push and scrap and kick and scream for every skerrick of advantage.
The beauty of contact sport has always been about taking everything you hate about this wretched existence called life - issues with your father, an inability to truly love another, Tim Bailey's tendency to turn every sentence into a rhyme while reading the weather on Ten News - and channelling it so you can efficiently slam an opponent into the middle of next week. They won't admit this publicly, but it is so.
It appears a love triangle between long-time partner Kylie Stray and a bikini model nobody has ever really heard about is troubling Hall's soul and manifesting itself in occasional, errant punches on the paddock.
Love triangles, as we can all attest, can be tricky - although a love triangle is always far better than a love flatline. The point is Hall is not the first to struggle with keeping his emotions in check on the field when life is a hurricane of drama off it.
Besides, it's the menace in Hall that keeps a fickle Sydney market interested. An angry, bald-headed loose cannon always stirs curiosity, as much as Andrew Demetriou will never admit it.
When Hall returned from his seven-match ban for his strike on Staker, triple Brownlow medallist Bob Skilton weighed in with this: "He's hard, he's aggressive, I don't want him to change his game."
Nor should he. The Swans have every right to manage their highest-profile player as they see fit. But it will be in nobody's interests if they take the fight out of Big Bad Bazza Hall. It's an edge the Swans should not try to plane off their big full forward. And "Barry" just doesn't have quite the same ring, does it?
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