SENIOR Sydney players have thrown their support behind suspended forward Barry Hall and urged him not to resign from the club's leadership group.

The club's eight-strong senior panel yesterday told Hall that they believed his punch on West Coast defender Brent Staker had been out of character.

With Hall fronting the group for the first time since the incident, they told him they still considered him a team leader and that he would have learned from the experience.

Hall approached Swans coach Paul Roos in the days after he was suspended, asking whether it would be best if he stepped down from the leadership group. Roos told Hall not to make any rash decisions but to go away and think about it. It is not known if Hall has decided to stay on as a leader.

"Hally met with them today and he's going to speak to the rest of the (player) group tomorrow," Roos said last night. "The leadership group are keen for him to stay. They have made that very clear to him. They think that is the best thing for him to do. They still see him as very much a leader and they have also shown that they support him and the fact they believe this incident was out of character. They were very honest with him and it was a good meeting, but at the end of it, they are keen for him to stay in the leadership group."

Hall's actions were frowned upon at the time by members of the leadership group, both privately and publicly, and it was expected the player would be asked to resign from the group when it finally met for the first time since the fateful night at ANZ Stadium.

Swans co-captain Craig Bolton said at the time that Hall's actions had put their leadership group into "uncharted territory" when it came to deciding on the course of disciplinary action to take with the key forward.

"He's obviously going to want to win some respect and trust back from among the group," Bolton said at the time. "How he goes about doing that he can outline to us next week.

"It is a case of working through it with Barry, telling him how we feel and being honest about it.

"People get suspended quite often in football, it's just that the circumstances surrounding this one are a little bit different. The circumstances surrounding the incident weren't something we as a playing group endorse. So … we are in a little bit of uncharted territory."

Hall stepped down from his role as co-captain at the end of last season to focus more on his football.

■THE fence surrounding ANZ Stadium that left Hall with a broken wrist will now be covered in padding following a review by the AFL. Hall broke his wrist after crashing through the flimsy signage in the same match as the Staker punch incident.

AFL ground operations manager Jill Lindsay and a risk assessor decided the club's fence signage would now be padded and required to be placed at the same height as the temporary fence. The railing lines on the stadium's retractable seats on each wing area will also now be padded.

■INJURED Port Adelaide star Chad Cornes will miss one game for striking St Kilda's Jason Blake after going to the tribunal last night. He argued that his blow was with a forearm, which he said was aimed at Blake's body but slipped up to his neck, and was not of enough force to constitute a strike.

He is set to miss three or four games anyway, after breaking a finger in the same match. And after serving the one-game ban, he will be left with only 25 carryover points.

Tribunal counsel Jeff Gleeson said Cornes' action was clearly in the strike category, as he had pulled his arm back then swung it through at Blake.