Opinion
Oh Bailey.
Your luscious long hair is remarkable.
AI wouldn’t be capable of generating cheese grater abs as perfect as yours.
And as for playing the game, in the Cats hoops you’re playing better than ever before.
Yet, for all the things that place Bailey Smith so far above the great unwashed, as well as his 362,000 Instagram followers, his post-match comments about the Bulldogs playing in Ballarat confirmed that he is just like us.
He’s as susceptible to the lowest common denominator chirps as the average couch potato dishing out misspelt Facebook comments.
Don’t get me wrong, Smith’s gratuitous jibe about the Bulldogs playing games in Ballarat is magnificent theatre.
Take off his Geelong guernsey while keeping the headband and Smith could have been (badly) cutting a WWF heel promo in 1989.
All kudos to him for injecting some potent juice in a rivalry that always plays relatively nice. If broadcasters aren’t blasting The Avalanches ‘Since I Left You’ over slow motion montages of Smith running away from hapless opponents in the lead up to the Dogs and Cats Round 11 clash they need to expand their musical palette.
But using crowd sizes as a baseball bat to whack clubs and their supporters is solely the domain of the nuffiest social media nuffs.
And Football’s Fabio is guilty of the crime of being base enough to run the same argument.
Scroll Twitter when North Melbourne, Melbourne, St Kilda or the Bulldogs are playing a non/Victorian team at home and the chorus is loud, predictable and often laden with poor grammar.
The punch-down playbook goes something like this: ‘Team X supporters are pathetic, they don’t get crowds like my team, they should be thrown out of the ground/league’.
The facts are that some clubs simply have fewer supporters than others. Whether it’s geographical, generational or something else – that plays out in membership figures.
In 2024 Collingwood led the league with 110,000 members. Victorian teams Carlton, Richmond, Geelong, Hawthorn and Essendon follow – all above 83,000. There’s then almost a 20,000 gap back to Melbourne at 65,000, the Bulldogs and St Kilda just behind and North Melbourne trailing back on 50,000.
Those numbers are incontrovertible. Then there’s the AFL fixture, which is a maximiser of revenue.
That means those four teams are frankly going to get exposed more often with low crowds. It is set up that way. Ask Melbourne’s commercial department who copped the nightmare trio of GWS (in driving rain), Gold Coast and Fremantle (both in 1:20pm slots, one on Easter Saturday) as its first three home games this season.
This is why there are equalisation policies.
The Bulldogs in Ballarat is a function of these structural inequities, and a pretty noble one at that. Footy club from the city takes the big show to a regional centre (with associated cheque) and show that people outside of Melbourne do matter to footy.
Apparently it’s lost on Smith that he now plays for Geelong, a regional centre just like Ballarat.
Civic superiority doesn’t play that well with the masses, so don’t expect him to add Visit Ballarat to his list of sponsors alongside Cotton On anytime soon.
Bailey Smith in his new Geelong colours. Photo: Geelong Cats
Also lost is that in 2025, the two Geelong games played at their home stadium have seen crowds below 31,000 while all Bulldogs games played at their home stadium Docklands have topped that figure.
Perhaps park that misplaced snobbery for the moment then, along with the mental gymnastics required to compare a Collingwood v Geelong crowd with a Bulldogs v Power match attendance.
Yet the irony of all this is what will happen when Geelong face the Bulldogs in a few weeks.
The impossibly pretty, and excellent player, in an uber-successful team, will cop the wrath of social media for his comments, motivated by a mixture of jealousy and justice for the underdog cause.
Yet when it comes to crowd numbers, the same social media trolls gladly dunk on the underdog – just like Smith fell into this week.
Not for the first time, the best and worst of Bailey Smith are inextricably linked with social media.
Hyping up a game that promises to be one of the best of the season. Tick. Proving that your mental weaponry doesn’t extend beyond the imagination of the average troll on Facebook. Tick.
Bring on Round 11.
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Should have faked a hamstring injury!
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