Robert Gill

Elijah wasn't moving like he was at his peak in terms of physical presentation.

The situation seems to be that his mental health impacted on his ability to physically get himself into the game as a professional footballer.

Still has not touched the footy, and we're almost 17 minutes into the final quarter.

Well, in a AFL situation, at the professional level, obviously, the club is the employer.

So the club has ultimate responsibility for their employee, which in this case is Elijah.

So Carlton itself has...

had the overarching responsibility on the evening but of course carlton as a club that are a member of the afl competition are beholden to the afl commission and the afl commission then sets down rules and regulations

and protocols that it imposes on the clubs to be part of their competition.

So it's kind of a grey area, but ultimately on the evening, the health and wellbeing of the players is the responsibility of their host club.

Well, I believe clubs do have those kind of processes in place.

It's interesting listening to a lot of the discussions that have been going on on the AFL media shows and a lot of the experts that are on those shows have experience as coaches, as players or as assistant coaches experiencing

in the system itself.

And they spoke of the situations where there would be around about 10 health and wellbeing staff members available for every game that will be interacting with the players before the game.

So it's surprising to me, and I guess it's surprising to most people,

that Elijah's situation occurred and developed and continued to develop right throughout the game.

So that's the surprising part.

But the responsibility with that obviously lies with the clubs and their staff.

And from what I can understand,

the staff themselves do interact with players before the game and they're checking on the welfare of the players before the game.

I would imagine a lot of that, the focus would be on the physical health of the player, but you would think that they would pick up