From the Pocket: Jack Ginnivan will swagger into Adelaide ready to lap up any hostility

There was an awful lot of booing over the weekend. Donald Trump was booed at Flushing Meadows, a short drive from where he was born. A rather bewildered Australian prime minister was booed in Western Sydney – never a good sign for a Labor politician. There were howls of derision over the umpiring on Friday night. And the Crows crowd didn’t stop booing for three hours at the Adelaide Oval.

In that instance, it was not only puerile and incomprehensible, but self-defeating: it helped perpetuate the siege mentality in which Collingwood thrives.

Footy gropes uncertainly, and often unconvincingly, towards something resembling basic decency. But for many fans on Thursday night, it would have been an unpleasant experience. There comes a point, just as there did with the booing of Adam Goodes, where you have to decide whether you’re an adult or an asshole. Maybe after the 50th boo and the 50th Collingwood intercept mark you’d ask yourself: “What the hell am I actually doing here” – or, more importantly: “Why am I doing it?”

The AFL didn’t exactly help. “We have the best fans in the world,” was Andrew Dillon’s response. As opposed to who, Andrew, Tanzanian table tennis enthusiasts? It’s a way of saying: “Nothing to see here, next question.”

But whenever these incidents occur, it’s worth reflecting on the role of the AFL and its host broadcasters. They’re happy to ply the fans with piss, to get out-of-work-actors to scream at them during breaks and to film bays of supporters hurling abuse at the umpires. When faced with a potential tinderbox, they’ll make some noise about extra security staff, gently tut-tut anyone who crosses the line and issue statements reminding us of the magnificence of the fans and the sport.

Such is the environment Jack Ginnivan will swagger into this week. The last time he was in Adelaide, he was collared at the airport by a court reporter, a journalist more used to ambushing people who have often forfeited the right to a bit of space. She’d clearly been put up to it by her news director. We’re all trying to make a dollar and we all say and write things in the media that we’re not especially proud of, but this was particularly objectionable.

“Are you embarrassed giving the Crows the middle finger because they’ve won and you’ve lost?” she asked. The smug, baiting tone was similar to the worst of the tabloidal dross when the English cricket team is in town; it was also a throwback to the old State of Origin days. Ginnivan, to his credit, treated it with the contempt it deserved.

It’s the way he plays that often rubs people up the wrong way. As an opposition fan, he kicks goals at precisely the moment you least want him to. When there’s a 50-metre penalty, you can bet he’ll be the one on the end of it. When you’ve emphasised getting a fast start, you can bet he’ll kick a goal in the first 30 seconds. He’ll sneak in from the side or lurk out the back and you just want to throttle him.

But he’s a much better footballer than he’s often given credit for. He does the maths well, works his angles and never wastes energy. Not especially quick, he nonetheless has outstanding spatial awareness, patience and timing. He works harder, pushes further up the ground and has been given a lot more trust by his current coach than he ever had at Collingwood.

Footballers are so wary of causing offence and providing ammunition these days; it says a lot about how much we’ve sucked the personality out of the game that such a benign figure is considered a pantomime villain. But Ginnivan has cultivated and traded off that status. There’s a kind of studied smartarsery about him, a young man who knows what he’s doing and where the line is.

Most of his carry-on is harmless; it might be a cheeky face to a cheer squad, a fishing line on social media, or dinner at the pub before a big game. Footballers speak like management consultants these days so anyone who does things differently is always going to stand out.

Since the Ken Hinkley debacle, Ginnivan has shown he can take it, that he can laugh about it in the right spirit and that the more he’s booed, the better he plays. There’s no place in football for abusing players who have been on the receiving end of slurs and for chasing people through airports. But we still need heels. And crowds are still entitled to buy into that – to stir, to bay, and yes, to boo.

Sections of the Adelaide mob lacked the wit, the irony and the decency to realise that Isaac Quaynor was no heel. Ginnivan will make things a bit simpler for them. Just like last week, however, all their hooting and hollering may play right into his hands.

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