‘Not everyone who is booing Adam Goodes is a racist’

True, but of all the reserves of passion and energy you have why would you be devoting any of them to defending non-racist booers? They’re not the kind of collateral damage we should care about. There are almost certainly more worthy causes for this indignation. Non-racist booers would do well to stop and everyone else would do well to avoid defending them, because they engage in this activity knowing that they’re providing a cover for racists, which is in many ways worse.

If you’re booing Adam Goodes on purely football grounds – which seems a bit suss to me but I’ll go with it for the sake of the debate – surely there’s a place in football fandom for basic human empathy and guilt. One day we’ll have to admit to our kids and grandkids that yes, we did indeed see this magnificent footballer play his 370 games, win his two Brownlow Medals, two premierships, four All-Australian jumpers and the Australian of the Year award, and in return for the joy he brought us all we could do was boo him into retirement.

This is about history. It’s about a worryingly high amount of the so-called lovers of a sport getting together and heckling one of its great champions to the finishing line because (insert tenous reason here). A lot of football fans don’t like Goodes because he had the temerity to stand up for his people and ask questions that could make their country a better place, questions that make some people feel uncomfortable. The fans of other sporting codes are watching this, laughing at and maybe pitying AFL supporters. Everyone wears this shame.

‘But the reason I boo him is because he’s a filthy sniper. Have you seen the things he does out there? Just a dirty player.’

In answer to this I’ll first direct you to YouTube to investigate the career of Leigh Matthews, once voted the greatest player in the history of the game and through less official channels, often spoken of as the filthiest. As indisputably great as he was, Matthews was so ludicrously physical that police watching the famous Neville Bruns incident charged him with assault causing grievous bodily harm. At other times he’d step on players’ fingers as they rose from the mud, he’d knee them, clothes-line them and he’d belt them clean in the jaw while they were looking the other way.

Why do I mention this? Because Matthews is part of the brutally rough and often violent lineage of the game. You know, before it became sanitised and over-officiated and the league still proudly endorsed videos entitled “Biffs, Bumps and Brawlers Volume 2”. Actually, they still do that. To say that as exulted a champion of the game as Matthews was dirtier than Goodes is like saying that Jimmy Page played his guitar louder than José Feliciano.

In the time between Matthews and Goodes we’ve seen a procession of far dirtier players than the latter, ones who were never unduly booed and whose reputation as players remains undiminished as a result. And now? Brownlow medal favourite Nat Fyfe is a rougher player than Goodes. Jarrad Waite’s boot studs are more dangerous than either. Between the pair of them, Dustin Fletcher and Brent Harvey have more dirty tricks at their disposal than the rest of the league’s players combined.

But unlike Goodes, Fletcher and Harvey are not being howled at and abused by thousands of people every time they go near the ball, not even Harvey, who’s not the most likable footballer on earth. Like Goodes, what Fletcher and Harvey now lack in explosive athleticism they’ve quite ably covered with street smarts; the odd well-timed shove in the back or sneaky trip that umpires miss. They know where umpires are placed and they’re better at anticipating the movements of opponents. In most sports that kind of veteran nous is celebrated.

You’d also have to wonder what the Venn diagram overlap is between people who want footy to return to the “good old days” when men were men and poleaxed each other in the name of sport, and those who are earnestly trying to convince themselves that Goodes even sits in the top 1,000 dirty players in the game’s history.

‘But Wayne Carey and Stephen Milne got booed just as bad as this’

Do we really have to break down the reasons for this? We do? Sheesh, OK. First, Carey was only booed to a comparable – but certainly not the same – degree as Goodes in the immediate aftermath of his departure from North Melbourne, which came about after an affair with the wife of one of his closest team-mates and friends; a team-mate who was a revered figure at the club. All of us who watched Carey live in his prime can tell you he wasn’t being booed like this. Anyone who says Carey was treated like Goodes is now is either grossly exaggerating or simply wasn’t there.

As for Milne, the criminal allegations that followed him through most of his career were a complicated, multi-layered issue that fans responded to in ways that were at once predictable and deeply strange. But stepping back from it and no matter what your take was at the time or now, what you had was a footballer taking the field every week under the public suspicion of having committed a crime. What crime has Goodes been accused of? To conflate the two situations is not only a red herring, but also deeply offensive.

‘If you tell people not to do something, they’ll go out of their way to do it’

OK, we’re now also waiting for your spirited defence of drink-drivers. After all, they’re told on an almost nauseating basis that they shouldn’t do it but it doesn’t give them a free pass to go drunkenly lane-swerving across freeways because doing so would make them anti-authoritarian larrikins. This approach just excuses people from acting stupidly, giving in to base impulses and doing away with basic human dignity.

‘The Goodes war dance was violent and threatening’

Are you huddled under blankets when the All Blacks perform the Haka? Do hip hop music videos make you soil yourself and collapse? Were you in the habit of calling 000 and reporting mass murder every time Gabriel Batistuta “machine-gunned” the crowd after a scoring a goal? Did you think the Liam Neeson movie Taken was a documentary about a lunatic running around the world snapping people’s necks? Perhaps it’s time to consider the fact that you might actually be an adult-sized baby.

The Goodes goal celebration was the most interesting and symbolic event to occur on a football field this year, a celebration of a culture all Australians could do better to embrace and understand. It might prove to be the most important football moment of the decade, a Winmar moment if you will. That the reaction of so many football fans was not one of curiosity and perhaps a little self-examination but one of childish name-calling and petulant booing will reflect poorly on all of us when the pages on Goodes are written into the game’s history.