The Binding of Izak
Or, how to lose a guy in 1 word.
Last Sunday at about 3pm was a good time to be a Crows supporter. The men’s team had beaten Collingwood for the first time since 2016 to sew up a top-two spot and home Qualifying Final. Meanwhile, the women’s team were about to embark on another AFLW season, with hopes of once again making it to the business end. Six hours later, the AFLW side had lost to St Kilda for the first time ever, with small forward Hannah Munyard suffering a lower leg injury that was later confirmed to be a broken ankle, and footy journos were reporting that a men’s player was being investigated for using a homophobic slur against a Collingwood opponent.
That player, as we now know, was Izak Rankine. At the time of writing, he is awaiting the outcome of an AFL Integrity Unit investigation that will stretch into an agonising fifth day. The investigation will almost certainly result in a suspension which will rule Rankine out of what would have been his first finals series. It looms as a season-altering – and, for the Crows, a potentially era-defining – moment (and decision). It is equally significant for the AFL. Rankine is not the first player to have uttered this particular slur on a footy field since the league hierarchy announced it would penalise its use. But, with respect to Wil Powell, Jeremy Finlayson, Lance Collard, Jack Graham, and Riak Andrew, he is by far the most significant. If the AFL is serious about creating a deterrent, it will find its courage and suspend Rankine for the remainder of the season.
Lest the first sentence of this post be interpreted as self-pity, it’s not. I’m not looking for sympathy. I’m not the victim here. Nor is Rankine. The victims are the Collingwood player on the receiving end of his taunt, every LGBTQI+ footy fan, and every person who, rightly or wrongly, feels an emotional affiliation with one of the game’s most exciting players. But I am a Crows fan – and I am dismayed. All of my Crows-supporting friends feel similarly. I’m disappointed in Rankine. I’m sad about the gloom that’s obscured what should have been the pure excitement of the club’s first finals series since 2017. And, in part, I’m also bemused by some of the reactions I’ve read online to the conduct of the player and the conduct of the club. So, because this platform is much better suited to expressing complex thoughts than, say, Twitter, here is my attempt to make some sense of this increasingly tawdry saga. My thoughts are ordered in vaguely descending order of intensity.
I’ll leave comments open for the time being, and I do encourage anyone with their own thoughts to share them. But please, try to ensure that they’re civil and respectful. I hope I’ve met that same standard. Tell me if you think I’ve failed.
Rankine should be suspended. This is important to say right off the bat. Perhaps this seems a given. But if you’ve had the misfortune to spend too much time on Twitter since the news broke (I can’t even imagine the takes flying around Facebook or Bigfooty), you’ll know this is by no means a universally held view. Too many Crows fans have donned the cloak of tribalism, claiming the presence of a Collingwood and/or AFL-led conspiracy. That’s not a healthy way to live. There are no excuses for what Rankine did. Some words really aren’t just words. They’re daggers, designed to hurt.
Historically, footy has been a hostile environment for non-straight people. I believe – I want to believe – we’re making some progress towards remedying that. But incidents like this, and the hornet’s nest they kick over, make that goal harder to accomplish. Even if one is dubious that words should elicit a multi-week suspension, this can be boiled down to something more pragmatic: the AFL has been very clear that any player found using this word will be suspended – and that the sanctions will be getting longer. For sheer stupidity and thoughtlessness alone, quite apart from the hurt he’s caused and how profoundly he’s let his team down, Rankine should be suspended.
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The Adelaide Football Club is entitled to defend its player. I mentioned above that I’ve been bemused by some of the takes I’ve read online. Some of those takes are about this exact subject. Many people appear to be feigning surprise that a professional football club, on the eve of a finals series, is leaving no stone unturned in its attempts to reduce the suspension handed down to one of its best players. Implicit in this claim is a belief that their chosen club wouldn’t or shouldn’t do the same. I think that’s naive. Rankine’s actions thrust the Adelaide Football Club into an invidious position. There isn’t really a precedent for such an important player being suspended for a non-football action so close to finals.
In challenging the suspension, or at least some elements of the investigation, the Crows have effectively chosen to trade large amounts of public goodwill for a slightly increased chance of one of their best players being available for a prelim or Grand Final. Most clubs, perhaps every club, would make the same trade. I don’t think this is a controversial claim – nor do I think it’s fair to expect Adelaide to suddenly adopt an unprecedented moral posture. Footy clubs are in the business of winning (insert joke about [club you want to deride] here). Pursuing that goal creates an obligation to their own players, staff and supporters that overrides fuzzier obligations to the spirit of the game. Clubs work unfathomably hard to win Premierships. Perhaps the median footy fan, especially one of a more progressive persuasion, doesn’t think that goal is worth pursuing at virtually any cost. But I think that, deep down, most players and coaches would take the opposite view.
Adelaide’s defence of Rankine doesn’t seem very coherent. That being said, I don’t think Adelaide’s defence should or will succeed. In fact, based on the tweets by various footy journos (more on this in the next point), they seem to be grasping at any straws they can find. If it’s true that Dan Houston taunted Rankine about the bump that knocked him out in the second Showdown of 2024, then I think that’s a low act. But I don’t see how that excuses Rankine for abusing a different player. Indeed, I think the idea of there even being extenuating circumstances for using a homophobic slur is very murky. I can certainly believe that Houston’s taunt would have put Rankine in a heightened emotional state. That would have been his aim. And perhaps it means the AFL needs to reflect on how it treats non-identity based sledges. But it’s hardly exculpatory.
The Crows also appear to be attempting to argue that finals games should be weighted differently to Home & Away fixtures. They’re not the first club to mount that argument – the Match Review Panel arguably gave Richmond captain Trent Cotchin special dispensation when they didn’t suspend him for the 2017 Grand Final after his bump on Dylan Shiel (no, I’m not still bitter). But I think that accepting that line of reasoning sets us down a slippery slope. A player being suspended for a routine Home & Away game can technically be the difference between their club making finals and not. Ultimately, it’s just impossible to police accurately. So I don’t think the AFL should make any distinction.
Finally, as a Crows fan, I sincerely hope the reports of the club citing the apparent hypocrisy of the AFL booking Snoop Dogg for the Grand Final performance despite professing a hard line on homophobic abuse in its submission to the Integrity Unit are misplaced. Because, wow, that would be embarrassing.
The AFL has mishandled this. There are two plausible models for how the AFL could have handled the media side of the Rankine saga. It could have assumed control from the outset by issuing a release on Sunday, confirming the Integrity Unit’s investigation, and then providing updates at each significant milestone. Or it could have adopted the “Jack Graham approach” – saying nothing until the organisation concluded and the suspension was handed down. It has apparently opted for a third: maximising clicks by feeding out small bits of information to select sources. Why are commercial media network journos giving us occasionally contradictory scoops? How did we end up with Eddie McGuire frontrunning the AFL and announcing, on Tuesday night’s Footy Classified, that Rankine would be suspended for five games? By letting information leak out in dribs and drabs, the AFL have arguably increased the amount of vitriol that LGBTQI+ footy fans have been subjected to. While I certainly don't think that was the AFL’s intention, it’s been a highly unfortunate byproduct.
Beyond the “optics”, there’s the more important issue that, once again, it seems the AFL has been caught on the hop by an unusual, yet highly impactful edge case. Footy is a dynamic game which naturally produces a dynamic set of outcomes. I can accept that the AFL didn’t have a template response for a high-profile player uttering a homophobic slur on the eve of finals, and his club vehemently pushing back on the initial findings. You simply cannot legislate for everything. But at seemingly every stage, the AFL has been too easily suggestible and too easily swayed. At some points, it feels as though it's been influenced by the Crows’ appeals to both novelty (the effect of the Houston sledge on Rankine) and at other times by precedent (the idea that finals should be given greater weight when considering suspensions). Even allowing the investigation to go on for so long has allowed conspiratorial thinking to fester. None of this is helped by the fact that the public is learning about this issue one news story at a time. I have some sympathy for the AFL. They’ve been given a hospital handpass. But this really is not how a putatively serious organisation should operate.
We’re missing the forest for the trees. We should be disgusted and disappointed with Izak Rankine. Reasonable people can have the same reaction to the actions of the Adelaide Football Club. But there’s a broader point looming over all of this: the AFL has a big problem with homophobic abuse. (To be clear, homophobic abuse is a society-wide problem, inflamed by backlash to diversity and inclusion initiatives. But that’s far too big a subject for my humble newsletter to tackle.) In case this sounds like an attempt to exonerate my Crows, I promise you, it’s not. I’ve seen lots of Adelaide supporters embarrass themselves by throwing around whataboutisms (what about Snoop?! What about Willie Rioli?!). It’s never nice to learn – or be reminded – that I share an allegiance with people like that. But this is much bigger than just Rankine or the Crows.
It’s shocking that, since the start of last year, six AFL players (and a senior coach!) have been cited for homophobic slurs. The obvious conclusion is that it was happening at least as often before the AFL introduced any kind of meaningful sanction. And, for the AFL’s (belated) good intentions on this issue, it’s not clear that things are improving. This has been a really rough week for LGBTQI+ footy fans. For many of them, this saga has confirmed that they’re not truly welcome in the AFL. This saga has uncorked some truly heinous sentiments – just look (or, rather, don’t look) at the replies to almost every high-profile tweet about it. The prospect of a current player coming out feels more remote than ever. A suspension that rules Rankine out for the finals would be, notionally, a strong deterrent. But the mere fact that so many players seemingly grasp for the F-slur when they’re trying to wound their opponents with words suggests a bigger, deeply rooted problem at play. How much progress are we actually making? I have no idea what the solution is. But, as clumsy as its approach might be, I hope the AFL doesn’t stop trying.
Great article. Apologies in advance for this long rant on your post :)
I think this case is interesting from a judicial and psychological perspective, because (i) that's my expertise, and (ii) the AFL is charged with running a system of justice here. The position the AFL is taking with homophobic language essentially boils down to a zero tolerance approach with mandatory minimum sentences for specific words. The primary sentencing option the AFL has open to it is suspensions. It's a blunt but highly deterrent instrument, and for an AFL player, missing 5+ matches (including all of finals) is a crushing sentence. The AFL despairs that homophobic insults continue despite all this, ignoring decades of evidence that analogous sentencing approaches in the criminal justice system have been ineffective at addressing crime because they ignore the underlying social and psychological functions of problem behaviour.
People engage in antisocial behaviour for different reasons, and in the criminal justice system these reasons are important because they can speak to one's moral culpability and the general deterrent effect of sentencing (and to be clear, this policy from the AFL is solely about general deterrence). I don't want to hypothesise too much about Izak specifically because it just sounds like I'm defending him, and my experience trying to voice my thoughts on social media was an unpleasant one. And I get that the AFL judicial system needs to be expedient and doesn't have time to consider everything. But there may be context here that we just don't have.
I just ask people to please keep an open mind about Izak and his basic character, and perhaps try to separate the action from the man. Remember that you don't know his story. Mateo, you say that everyone should feel disappointment and disgust towards Izak. Disappointment, sure. But disgust? Come on. Watch some of the vision back. The Collingwood players are getting stuck into him all day, taunting him both physically and verbally. Izak is losing his cool, mouthing off, and the Collingwood players are all laughing at him. Picture a young Aboriginal kid in an Adelaide public school. Do you think what was happening at AO might have reminded Izak of something?
Yes, I'm a bleeding heart. And yes, Izak needs to work on whatever personal issues he has that cause him to act out like this. You can't be a grown man acting like an angry child, and you can't use that language anymore. I just hope that, whatever happens, Izak can serve his sentence, get help and support, and then be welcomed back to the game with open arms as the brilliant player that he is. Based on the discourse on both traditional and social media of late, I'm not optimistic about the last part.
We have different views on this as you know. The AFL chose (rightly) to punish the use of homophobic language in the sport. They've also chosen to make those rules somewhat opaque and arbitrary, with some possible allowance for vibes around relative player contrition. It's unclear whether this ban just applies to 2-3 obvious words but that seems to be the case. Would izak be suspended if he'd used a slightly less direct expression with the same homophobic intent? I doubt it, which might not be entirely unreasonable but highlights the lack of principle at play.
In the context of what's being reported as some very torrid verbal exchanges, it's reasonable for Andrew Dillon to be asked why one of the words used leaves a player unavailable for the entire final series while some of the other exchanges escape any sanction whatsoever.
In any other workplace multiple people would be facing disciplinary action based on the media reports.