Nelson Asofa-Solomona will miss Melbourne’s grand final showdown with Penrith after the Storm prop failed in his bid to have a four-game NRL ban overturned.
Asofa-Solomona took an almighty roll of the dice on Monday, seeking to have a grade three careless high tackle charge reduced to a grade one.
Such downgrades are rarely successful but it was the New Zealand international’s only chance of escaping suspension for his hit on Sydney Roosters prop Lindsay Collins in the opening stages of last Friday’s preliminary final.
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Collins was so badly dazed by the hit he got up and played the ball backwards. He did not return to the field under the NRL’s concussion protocols.
Melbourne spared no expense in a bid to free their hulking prop for Sunday’s grand final, flying Asofa-Solomona and football manager Frank Ponissi to Monday’s hearing in Sydney and enlisting the help of Nick Ghabar.
Sydney lawyer Ghabar was the man who represented Billy Slater and got the legendary former Storm fullback cleared to play in his farewell game in the 2018 grand final.
The start to the hearing was delayed by 40 minutes and when it finally began, the Roosters’ chief medical officer Dr Matthew Morgan was cross-examined by both Ghabar and NRL counsel Lachlan Giles.
Morgan was unable to divulge whether Collins had passed his head injury assessment but Ghabar was eager to highlight how the Roosters prop had shown concussion symptoms in 11 of his 113 games in the NRL.
Asofa-Solomona’s lawyer then turned his attention to a comparable grade one high contact charge levelled at Queensland’s Valentine Holmes in State of Origin II in this year’s series.
Ghabar argued Holmes’ hit on Payne Haas, unlike Asofa-Solomona’s, displayed direct and forceful contact to the head with no attempt to wrap the arms.
But unlike in Slater’s case, Ghabar had no such luck this time around.
The panel of Bob Lindner and Paul Simpkins needed less than 15 minutes to find Asofa-Solomona guilty of a grade three transgression and uphold his suspension.
It means Sunday’s grand final will be the first of five games for which the front-rower is unavailable.
It’s unclear whether the Storm prop will try to use Test matches to count towards his suspension.
In the short term, Melbourne coach Craig Bellamy will have to find a replacement for Asofa-Solomona when he names his grand final team on Tuesday.
Six-game rookie Lazarus Vaalepu and Joe Chan were part of the Storm’s preliminary final squad and loom as the most likely options to come in for Asofa-Solomona.
