No Goodes: Booing is on the Crows to arrest

July 26, 2026 — 5:30am

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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........

© Brisbane Times