Geelong coach Chris Scott says long-held frustration with the AFL was behind his regrettable post-qualifying final win outburst at a junior female league employee.<\/p>\n
Addressing recent off-field issues at Geelong, including one involving enigmatic star Bailey Smith, for more than 20 minutes on Thursday, Scott acknowledged he had let himself down.<\/p>\n
But the dual premiership coach denied reports he had been aggrieved about the presence of an accredited reporter, who is blind and works for Vision Australia Radio, at his post-game press conference on September 5.<\/p>\n
An AFL staffer was left in tears after Scott spoke with her following the Cats’ victory over the Brisbane Lions.<\/p>\n
That report emerged after photographer Alison Wynd was left “rattled” after Smith aggressively singled her out for taking snaps of him last week at a training session open to the media.<\/p>\n
Scott and Smith were both not sanctioned by the AFL.<\/p>\n
“There’s just been a few little issues that have popped up where we thought that maybe we could have communicated with the AFL a little bit better to help them understand the way we were feeling about certain issues,” Scott said during a marathon 36-minute press conference on Thursday.<\/p>\n
“I didn’t handle a certain situation as well as I would have liked to, and let my frustrations get the better of me.”<\/p>\n
Geelong coach Chris Scott.\u00a0Photo by James Wiltshire\/AFL Photos via Getty Images<\/p>\n
Scott implied the incident had been leaked by someone to “get one up”.<\/p>\n
“I also acknowledge that it was a private conversation, and sometimes private conversations become public, and it would become a lot easier if you actually did litigate all those issues in an attempt to help people understand why those frustrations were so acute,” he said.<\/p>\n
“But I don’t think that’s fair.<\/p>\n
“There’s probably been frustrations with the AFL over a period, probably back to March 2020 (the start of the COVID-19 pandemic), but that’s across the whole industry.<\/p>\n
“I can’t think of a situation where I’ve portrayed what I thought were private conversations just to get one up on our side of the debate.<\/p>\n
“Do you then just let the floodgates open and release all the contents of those private conversations?<\/p>\n
“Or do you say no, even if we’re going to be the victim of some extrapolation or some innuendo, then that’s what I’m prepared to bear.”<\/p>\n
When speaking about Smith, who is second favourite to win the Brownlow Medal on Monday night, Scott said the magnetic midfielder was “less trusting of the media than I think he should be”.<\/p>\n
Scott and Smith were left fuming when what they thought was a private conversation at training was broadcast on the AFL’s website in July.<\/p>\n
“I’m pretty comfortable that while we acknowledge we’re not perfect, that we’ve got a pretty good track record,” said Scott.<\/p>\n
“It’s a contradiction almost: a highly marketable public person (Smith) who puts a lot of it out there, but then intensely personal about some issues.<\/p>\n
“Not only did (AFL Media) they choose to use it, they put subtitles underneath it, and actually extrapolated some of the things that were said and got it wrong.<\/p>\n
” … It’s not intended to be a defence.”<\/p>\n
Smith took part in Geelong’s captain’s run at GMHBA Stadium on Thursday, but left after about five minutes when media were allowed into the ground to watch.<\/p>\n
Scott is confident the former Western Bulldog is in a good headspace to help the Cats try to win through to a grand final by beating Hawthorn in Friday night’s preliminary final at the MCG.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Geelong coach Chris Scott says long-held frustration with the AFL was behind his regrettable post-qualifying final win outburst…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":151347,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[560],"tags":[638,64,63,55,639,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-151346","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-afl","8":"tag-afl","9":"tag-au","10":"tag-australia","11":"tag-australian-football-league","12":"tag-australianfootballleague","13":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151346","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=151346"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151346\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/151347"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=151346"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=151346"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=151346"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}