Michael Christian

speaker

245 appearances 3 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 2 Jun

Michael Christian’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 3.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

Whateley · Whateley - Tuesday | Full Show (02.06.26) · 2 Jun 2026 podcast

Greg Swan, when he came into the role, was really...

quite strong about cutting this type of behaviour out of the game.

And I think it's been successful.

Yes, yes, there's been a couple of those.

And look, we have issued a couple of fines where we don't think the level of force is sufficient to suspend a player.

So, yeah, there's always, as you know, and we've spoken many times before about, there is a large area of grey with all these things, whether it's a bump or a tackle or...

So it's always challenging, but I feel like the ones that have been suspended have been in accordance with the new guidelines.

Oh, there's no doubt that it's a benefit in my role.

As you just mentioned, it's always flexible.

In recent years, we've had the capacity or I've had the capacity to increase a suspension or increase a penalty when the impact didn't quite match the action.

So we've been able to, under a potential to cause or an action that might cause a more serious injury, I've been able to upgrade the number of weeks, but not downgrade until this year.

So just felt looking at the Sam Closey tackle that the observable force of that tackle

didn't necessarily correlate to what I would think would be a concussion.

And so took the opportunity to use the new guidelines to implement that and reduce that penalty down to two weeks.

Absolutely.

So, yeah, it's always challenging.

And we talk about grey, there's always grey, but it's basically, you know, hand on heart and trying to work through.

And I thought the observable force of that action didn't quite warrant the three-week suspension, which was the normal suspension under a concussion.

And Greg Swan supported that.

Showing 41–60 of 245 · page 3 of 13