Luke McDonald rang Conor McKenna to apologise after he taunted the Tyrone man during the weekend's game between North Melbourne and Essendon.
A row broke out between the two teams at quarter-time siren with McKenna's Essendon trailing by five points. As the players separated, McDonald held his hand over his mouth in a clear reference to McKenna testing positive for Covid-19 last month.
Saturday's game was McKenna's first since a messy situation which saw him become the first AFL player to test positive for the virus. He subsequently tested negative days later but the round three game between Melbourne and Essendon had already been postponed because of the positive test.
Though he did not believe that North Melbourne would face sanctions for Saturday's incident, head coach Rhyce Shaw felt the club needed to deal with it anyway.
Here's the clip of Luke McDonald covering his face in front of Conor McKenna today. pic.twitter.com/YIvPzw2jIG
— Maurice Brosnan (@m_brosnan) July 11, 2020
"We dealt with that internally," said Shaw.
"Already Luke's given Conor a call. From our perspective, it wasn't necessary, it's a bad look and is something that we don't stand for. He is disappointed in his own actions and we had a good chat about it.
"We addressed it straight away as soon as we felt it was the right time. He did that the next morning and we put it to bed quickly. Conor was really good about it and respected the phone call from Luke.
"I'm more than comfortable with where it sits. If Conor's all good with it then that's the main thing."
Essendon won Saturday's game by 14 points but there was bad news for McKenna afterwards. The AFL website that reported he broke a finger during the game and that he could face surgery.
