On the eve of an historic weekend for the AFL, a former player has vented his frustrations with a game that has long been marred by racial vilification against its Indigenous players.
The Adelaide Crows, the Brisbane Lions and the Fremantle Dockers are the latest clubs to have reported racist and homophobic comments — allegedly made towards four players on social media – this week.
Former AFL player and Aboriginal man, Troy Bond, played for Carlton and Adelaide in the 90s and was part of the Crows premiership winning team in 1997.
Ahead of his two former sides clash on Thursday, Bond asked "when will it stop" in light of recent attacks against current players.
"I was fortunate enough to only be vilified on one or two occasions in my career," he said.
"I feel really sorry for those players going through that now."
Bond admitted while there is no clear answer on how to get rid of racism from the game, he said the AFL "has to do something".
"I know they do a lot of cultural awareness training with every club and I'm not sure if all staff are required to do that too, but they should be," he said.
"It's always about learning, but how much more and how much longer do people need to learn?
"We always talk about reconciliation and yet we still have people dealing with this."
AFL boss lost for words
Exactly one year from when AFL CEO Gillon McLachlan announced he would step down from his role, McLachlan stood up at Adelaide Oval on Wednesday to spruik the League's newest attraction, the Gather Round.
An event in which every round five match will be played in South Australia starting on Thursday.
But the AFL boss found himself again speaking on an issue that he said he was running "out of words" for.
"We are taking the action we can, we work hard to track them down but we know they disappear and I'm exasperated," he said.
"Frankly, I think it offends 99.99 per cent of all football followers and all Australians.
"We're committed to working with our Indigenous players to make sure they get the support they need and to just let them know that these are very much the minority views and they have huge love and support across football and across the community."
A 'lighting rod' moment
The AFL's executive general manager of inclusion and social policy, Tanya Hosch, said it's not clear whether racial attacks on social media are increasing, or whether people are getting better at reporting it.
"The fact people are calling it out and reporting it, actually shows us that there are more people in our game that also reject this behaviour," Ms Hosch said.
"The more that we expose this kind of ugly and hateful behaviour, the better."
Ms Hosch was the first ever Indigenous person to join the AFL's executive ranks in 2016.
She said while the league seeks to tackle racial abuse with membership suspensions and attendance bans, they face a number of challenges when it comes to online abuse.
"It's a terrible challenge we face… particularly when people deliberately set up false accounts just for the purpose of vilifying people," she said.
"As a sporting code we are not the law so we need to identify an individual and sometimes that is possible.
"Then it would be up to the player who would be the one that would have to go forward with a police report."
But Ms Hosch said it was often hard to put that pressure on players to take the matter further.
"They just want to get on with playing footy," she said.
"They don't want to be the lightning rod through, which this country has another conversation about racism."
