Hawthorn coach Alastair Clarkson believes the penalty for interchange infringements is too harsh after his side had to settle for a draw with St Kilda after it looked set to take a 13-point lead with two minutes left.
The Hawks were in control as Cyril Rioli strolled in from 40m out to nail his set shot and put the Hawks 13 points up.
But as Hawthorn supporters went up as one, thinking their team had sealed its ninth win in ten games, the umpires called it back and paid a 50m penalty to St Kilda for an interchange infringement by Hawk Grant Birchall.
The Saints then streamed up the other end with few Hawks back and found their captain Nick Riewdolt, who goaled, before ruckman Ben McEvoy dribbled home the leveler with just 12 seconds to play.
Further infuriating the Hawks' camp were claims that Birchall was in fact the fifth man on the bench when he entered the field of play, meaning the interchange steward may have confused the situation given no one left the field when he came on.
Clarkson was less than impressed with the decision and the punishment but expected little action to be taken by the AFL.
"I'm not certain they'll have vision of it. The disappointment of the penalty, if it's an infringement or not, there's a blade of grass in it and to cop such a severe penalty and have the game changed and 50,000 not knowing what's going on and orange flags being waved," he said.
"It has no bearing on the outcome - over the line, one step over the line and that was what happened."
"That rule has been introduced to stop blatant 19-men on the ground kind of stuff and this is hardly blatant. We've just got to learn to deal with it and get on with it unfortunately."
While Clarkson was thrilled with his side's ability to match it with one of the best sides in the competition, although he lamented the last couple of minutes of play.
"When you get one or two goals in front you shouldn't lose games from that position."
"But we take enormous confidence out of that, we were in a pretty deep, dark hole earlier in the season and to the players' credit they've pulled themselves out of that and right at the minute they've got enormous belief in themselves and the direction that we're going."
"We've played against some really good football sides in the last three weeks and we've been very competitive but we just weren't quite good enough tonight to ram home the advantage when we had it yet we were good enough to stop St Kilda getting their natural flow."
The match proved to be one of the arm wrestles of the season with numerous lead changes and little between the sides all night.
"I've never seen a game of footy like that. As close as keenly contested from start to finish like that, it was probably a fitting finale in a sense," Clarkson said.
"Two sides (having) a genuine crack at one another and both sides at different stages looked like they were going to slip away and get a bit of scoreboard advantage and both sides couldn't capitalise on the chances that they had so we ended up with the result we did."
"We probably missed a few shots we could've nailed but we restricted them to 41 inside 50s (the Hawks had 52) which was really pleasing to restrict them to the amount we did."
"From our point of view we're really pleased with the effort, we really challenged one of the premier sides in the competition and I think we've shown the whole footy world that we can compete with these good sides, we've just got to add up our wins over the next five rounds to see how we go to see how we'll feature in September," he said.