By Jake Niall
Izak Rankine’s homophobic comment, made in the intense final quarter of a close encounter, travelled swiftly through the clubs and to the AFL’s chain of command.
The offensive taunt went from Rankine’s lips to a Collingwood opponent. The Magpies, soon aware after the game of what had transpired, told Adelaide’s head of football Adam Kelly in the period shortly after the match.
Under-siege Adelaide star Izak Rankine.Credit: Getty Images, Artwork: Matthew Absalom-Wong
And so, one could argue that the die was cast by late Saturday night – Rankine, one of the game’s most dynamic players, would be missing most, if not the entire finals series, subject to how many games the Crows played.
The Crows communicated the issue to the AFL on Sunday. Once clubs are aware of a vilification incident, they feel obliged to report it to the AFL.
The finals task ahead of Matthew Nicks’ Crows just got that much harder.Credit: AFL Photos
In this, there has been a major shift in club attitudes.
Today, there’s likely more fear of what would come from failing to report a vilification, than fear of what will happen to the offending player.
And so, by Sunday, Rankine had called the relevant Magpie to apologise. There was never any denial of the word uttered. That word – f----t – is viewed by the gay community in a similar light to the most egregious of racial slurs, as long-time gay rights activist Tony Keenan explained to me last year.
It is the same word that Port Adelaide’s Jeremy Finlayson used and received a three-match ban at Gather Round [v Essendon] in April last year, when the AFL warned that future homophobic cases would bring heavier penalties.
The process for defending a player in Rankine’s situation is as follows:
1. The AFL determines what happened, by interviewing the players concerned, and then offers a penalty;
2. The player and his club have an opportunity to either accept the penalty, or contest it via a written submission.
It is an evolving system that has become increasingly contentious, in part because of inconsistencies in outcomes. Is Rankine’s ban the same as Finlayson’s? Why not three? Or why not five like others?
But, as with tribunal cases for on-field matters, these cultural transgressions are also heavily influenced by the arguments mounted by the clubs and players – and potentially, the quality of their legal team’s work.
Adelaide lobbied for a three-week ban, in the knowledge that this was optimistic.
The AFL offered a five-match ban, which to the club’s chagrin, soon became public knowledge.
Adelaide’s submission to have Rankine’s ban reduced included two key arguments. One was that finals were a heavier penalty (even though no distinction has ever been made for finals) – and, in Rankine’s case, a five-match ban would put a line through the grand final.
More telling, according to AFL chief executive Andrew Dillon, was the medical submission made on Rankine’s behalf.
This medical submission came from a qualified expert, who outlined mental health issues that had affected Rankine.
The Crows have been at pains to say that they did not run what might be termed “the Snoop Dogg defence”, the notion that the rapper’s presence at the grand final this year was a tacit turning of a blind eye to homophobia, given Snoop Dogg’s rap sheet, so to speak.
It is remarkable that the AFL CEO felt compelled to defend the choice of rapper for the grand final, essentially saying the Snoop had cleaned up his act and been vetted by the NFL and Olympics.
The Crows scored what might be termed a small victory by successfully cutting the ban from five weeks to four, giving Rankine a sliver of hope that he could play in the grand final (if the Crows lose the qualifying final).
The ramifications of the four-match ban are considerable, not least the dent to Adelaide’s premiership hopes, given Rankine’s extreme talents.
But there’s so much more to this case than just the scoreboard.
The AFL is still navigating how to deal with homophobia, 30 years after Michael Long’s objection to racial abuse by Collingwood’s Damian Monkhorst on Anzac Day changed the game, prompting the creation of rules and a framework to deal with vilification.
The Rankine case also gives clubs an incentive to contest and fight any sanctions for off-field misdeeds, to lawyer up and fight them on the benches. As with the Giants’ “wacky Wednesday” – a series of grubby skits – the penalty can be successfully challenged. You can fight city hall, since the AFL must be mindful of what would happen if a club/player took his case to the Supreme Court.
Jeremy Finlayson has previously served a suspension for using a homophobic slur.Credit: Ben Searcy
In the months and years immediately after Long-Monkhorst, there was a flurry of racial abuse cases, some of which were mediated between players without sanction. The culmination was the four-match “voluntary” ban given to St Kilda’s Peter Everitt for racist abuse of Fremantle’s Scott Chisholm.
The pattern of homophobia now is redolent of racial vilification three decades ago. Finlayson’s ban opened the floodgates – the sewers, perhaps – as a succession of incidents bedevilled the competition, West Coast’s Jack Graham and Sydney’s Riak Andrew receiving four and five-match suspensions this year, on top of suspensions to Gold Coast’s Wil Powell (five) and Saint Lance Collard (six). Andrew and Collard’s bans derived from VFL games.
But if the question has been posed of why players are continuing to offend, and whether the clubs/AFL are failing in education, club and AFL staffers also contend that – as with racism in the ’90s – one positive is footballers are now actually highlighting homophobic transgressions, when past practice was to bury the offence.
It follows that, over time, these on-field homophobic taunts will recede and become much less frequent, as with racist taunts (Taylor Walker’s offence being the exception). On racism, the AFL was probably at the vanguard of a shifting culture – even ahead of the curve in combating ingrained prejudice. Racism persists, of course, but the locus has moved from on-field to online, which remains shocking.
On homophobia, I would venture that the AFL is running behind the mainstream, which is also evident in the ongoing absence of any openly gay or bisexual male AFL player. The AFLW, of course, has been highly influential in reshaping mores, and one should not ignore, either, that young men in their 20s tend to be more tolerant of same sexuality than older generations.
Izak Rankine cannot have known the chain of events that his ill-chosen word would trigger, in addition to the thousands of people it triggers. The impact cannot be measured in goals or games lost.
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