Melbourne is going to lose Angus Brayshaw for the rest of the finals and his angry coach wants consequences for the hit that caused his injury.
AFL: Melbourne’s Angus Brayshaw was left unconscious and had to be stretchered from the MCG after a flying collision with Collingwood’s Brayden Maynard. Teammate Jack Viney got stuck into Maynard, resulting in a shredded jumper.
Brayshaw is set to miss “a few weeks” after his first-quarter collision with Maynard in Thursday night’s qualifying final at the MCG. It could mean his finals campaign is over.
Goodwin suggested the Collingwood defender should face consequences for the hit, which knocked Brayshaw out cold in a continuation of his troubling history of head knocks.
Brayshaw sat out half of his second season in 2016 and the majority of 2017, as he suffered four concussions over the course of 12 months.
“I guess that will be sorted out during the week, but we‘ve got a pretty shattered player in there … you can only go by the facts,” Goodwin said.
“You (Maynard) jumped off the ground and knocked a guy out, so I guess time will tell.
“He’s upset, he’s obviously had a history with concussion a long time ago, so he’s dealing with some emotion there, but he wants to play finals footy – he’s going to be missing for a few weeks, and that’s disappointing.”
Goodwin said a poor first quarter had let the Demons down more than their terrible conversion, managing only seven goals from 69 inside 50s to Collingwood’s 37.
“There‘s a lot of optimism, we played the right way for a big part of that game … to dominate territory, to dominate inside 50, to win the (contested possessions) by 15 by the end of the game, that’s a pretty big turnaround in the game of footy, and that gives us a lot of heart because that is what stands up in finals footy,” he said.
“But you‘ve got to do it for the whole time, and in the first quarter we weren’t able to do that.”
Goodwin said Brayshaw‘s withdrawal from the game in the first quarter had left Melbourne unable to deploy Christian Petracca forward as much as planned, contributing to the poor offensive performance.
“We just didn‘t execute as well as we would have liked once we had our opportunities, and that shows up on the scoreboard – we didn’t kick a big enough score to win, so we’ve still got a little bit of work to do in that space,” he said.
The coach said he had not seen much of the incident involving Jacob van Rooyen, who appeared to collect Dan McStay in the chin with a bump during the first term.
He said van Rooyen was unlikely to be in trouble with the MRO because McStay remained on the ground, although the key forward did spend 20 minutes on the bench as he received a concussion test.