Football boss Andrew Mackie was asked about boom recruit Smith, who had a terrific season on the field but courted controversy off it, at Monday’s AFL trade period launch.<\/p>\n
The Cats are set to ditch their traditional Mad Monday celebrations after widespread criticism of some controversial costumes and questionable social media antics, including from Smith, last week.<\/p>\n
When asked how the dust had settled from that event, Mackie pointed to the AFL grand finalist’s statement at the time and said: “Obviously, we’re not perfect. We don’t stand here and pretend to be.<\/p>\n
“When you’ve got a playing list and staff like us, there’s no finished product.<\/p>\n
“We’re a work in progress all across the board as a club, like everyone probably should be. We’re no different.<\/p>\n
“Every now and then,there’s things that pop up that ideally don’t, but we can only learn and educate from here our players and our people.”<\/p>\n
Mackie rubbished a report that the club hadn’t known Smith’s whereabouts in recent days and was confident in how they were handling the 24-year-old, who starred off a knee reconstruction in his first season at Geelong.<\/p>\n
“Really confident,” he said.<\/p>\n
“No, that wasn’t all factual – I was aware what he was up to.<\/p>\n
“But, like I said, I get the interest in Bailey. But him playing footy this year is a real success story for the game.<\/p>\n
“As I said, we’re all not perfect. We’ve just got to continue to keep working together and those little moments that might bubble away, we’ve just got to keep on educating.”<\/p>\n
Mackie wouldn’t divulge how he or the club had spoken to Smith about his recent indiscretions, which also included verbally abusing a female photographer.<\/p>\n
“It’s not our style to communicate to media about how we talk to our players and work through that stuff,” he said.<\/p>\n
“So once again, I get the interest, but that’s not something that we’re willing to talk about publicly, about how we go about that.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Football boss Andrew Mackie was asked about boom recruit Smith, who had a terrific season on the field…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":192712,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[560],"tags":[638,64,63,55,639,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-192711","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\/192711","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=192711"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192711\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/192712"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=192711"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=192711"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=192711"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}