Opinion
When Adam Goodes was booed, week after week, to the point that the champion became disillusioned with the game, the responsibility for arresting the boos rested with the AFL.
Goodes had been booed by sections of supporters from nearly every club, excepting his own. The degree to which the booing was racially motivated was contested, but it was clear to me that Goodes had been booed, to a large extent, because, he had taken up the cudgels of speaking out on Indigenous/racism issues, following an incident in which he was racially abused by a 13-year-old girl at a Collingwood game on national television and highlighted it.
The booing was relentless over 2014 and 2015. Goodes, who had not been hooted at for the first 300 or so games of his career, had been made Australian of the Year before the unseemly booing occurred.
The AFL was slow off the mark and equivocated, in what was Gillon McLachlan’s worst episode, as the then AFL chief executive sought to balance the different strands of opinion within the game – including on the AFL Commission – rather than stating that the booing of Goodes was offensive and seeking ways to stomp on it.
More than a decade since his retirement, Goodes remains in exile.
Today, it is the Adelaide Crows, rather than the AFL, who hold the primary responsibility for persuading a mob to cease booing an opposition footballer, Isaac Quaynor, as a result of an incident that took place on the field, whose ripples in the pond spread far beyond the boundary line.
Unlike the Goodes situation, this drama is confined to one club’s fans, Adelaide’s. The victim of the booing is not so much Quaynor – though it is doubtless unwelcome for the Collingwood defender. The offended party are many within the gay community.
It is harder to confront the behaviour of a portion of fans than that of players and officials. This was demonstrated graphically during the Goodes saga.
But this does not absolve the Adelaide Crows of responsibility; at the least, they must do their utmost to halt the booing of Quaynor the next time they play Collingwood.
It could happen six weeks from now, in the 2026 finals series. Or next year.
Some of the booers will assert that they are not hooting Quaynor because of homophobia, just as multitudes reckoned booing Goodes was due to staging or some other supposed failing by the champion.
It is true that many Crow booers will see Quaynor as a snitch, whose testimony deprived them of Izak Rankine during the finals last year. Some may have had a skinful of beers. Some might blame the AFL and dark Victorian conspiracy against their club.
If there was a plausible deniability for the initial booing – “we’re booing him because he dobbed on Rankine” – that excuse will not wash when gay, bisexual and lesbian people, some openly lesbian AFLW Adelaide players included, are offended and view the booing of Quaynor as a collective slight.
Matthew Nicks had sought to dissuade fans from booing in the lead in to the game. Alas, the coach’s exhortation was not heeded.
But Nicks’ choice of words – and even that of the club after their defeat – did not hit the mark with Mitch Brown, the first openly bisexual (ex) AFL player, who felt the booing was a version of homophobia and that the Adelaide coach had not been anywhere near strong enough in his condemnation.
“If you want it to be [stamped] out, if you look down the barrel of that camera and say, ‘We do not stand for this’ [it would be more impactful] … who are you trying to protect when you’re being like, ‘It’s a passionate game’?”
Brown suggested Nicks did not want fans to hate him for calling them out.
The counterpoint to Nicks in the Goodes imbroglio were then Fremantle coach Ross Lyon and long-time West Coast CEO Trevor Nisbett. Both club leaders were forthright in telling their own members and fans that if they booed Goodes, it was unacceptable.
“If you continue to boo Adam Goodes, well you’re a racist and you’re a bigot,” said Lyon.
Commendably, Lyon and Nisbett were willing to risk a backlash from the membership, and their stance made some difference when the AFL was asleep at the wheel.
Adelaide can show similar leadership, if they wish. The first step is a shift in language, without the qualifications of “passionate” fans.
One admitted complication in homophobic cases in the AFL – which have proliferated since 2024 (mostly in games at VFL level), as players began to call out the use of the F word – is that the victim’s sexual preference is not necessarily gay or bisexual (usually not) and is a private identity, when a person’s race is almost invariably visible or known.
The AFL’s investigation of the Rankine slur was not handled in a way that defused the homophobic strain.
Rankine was offered a five-match ban, which prompted the Crows to fight hard against the level of sanction, eventually reducing it to four matches. The club chairman John Olsen called his AFL counterpart Richard Goyder, as part of the lobbying process.
This column’s view is that the AFL’s escalation of sanctions, from three matches to four or five, was unwise and counter-productive, since it encouraged clubs to lawyer up and fight them on the benches.
Had the sanction for homophobic slurs been three matches, as Jeremy Finlayson received in the first incident in 2024, there would be less forceful opposition, and – not least – the person who received the slur would not be as targeted by the hateful fans.
What can the Crows do from here? Treatment is always more difficult than diagnosis. But they can start with unequivocal statements.
The ABC’s Corbin Middlemas, who is openly gay, was another who felt Adelaide had to be firmer in condemnation of their own tribe. He floated (on Fox Footy) the more drastic idea that the AFL could bar the Crows from hosting Collingwood for some years, hitting the bottom line.
One lesson from the Goodes saga was that fans can be influenced by their own star players. If it hurt Shaun Burgoyne to hear Goodes booed by Hawthorn supporters – Burgoyne said he “hated the booing” – the brown-and-gold booers might desist.
Jordan Dawson, who spoke to the AFL Players’ Association on Friday, is an articulate and thoughtful leader who can talk directly down the barrel of the camera.
The Crows, in tandem with Port Adelaide, did deploy player power in seeking to prevent anti-social behaviour at Showdown games. Results were mixed.
Within the Crows, there was an understanding that when the Rankine-Quaynor incident detonated in August that this could well be a dark cloud that hovered over the club for two or three years.
One would hope that it doesn’t stretch into the finals if they meet Collingwood, or into next year. Action – if only in the form of the right words – is now required.
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Jake Niall is a Walkley award-winning sports journalist and chief AFL writer for The Age.Connect via X or email.
