Adelaide assistant coach Mark Bickley has refused to say whether he believes the Crows were right to force recruiting manager Matt Rendell out of the AFL club.
Bickley said he did not believe Rendell was a racist, despite his resignation last week after a racist remark he made to AFL community engagement manager Jason Mifsud in January became public.
Rendell told Mifsud that the AFL was heading towards a situation in which the Crows wouldn’t recruit an indigenous player unless he had at least one white parent.
Rendell has since said that comment was a ridiculous throw-away line and he would never actually have such a policy.
Rendell told the Nine Network’s Footy Classified program on Monday night he was given no choice but to quit the Crows, as the club believed “mud would stick” to them should he stay on.
Bickley said it was not his place to judge Rendell or comment on the Crows’ reaction.
“It’s not for me to say whether he has been hardly done by or not,” Bickley said on Tuesday.
“There’s people in places who make those decisions, not me. I’m a football coach – I’m not a human resources person at the Adelaide Football Club.”
AFL chief executive Andrew Demetriou said on Monday night that Crows CEO Steven Trigg had given Rendell a chance to back away from the controversial statement, but he had refused.
Rendell strongly disputed that version of events.
He said the line which led to his exit was a stupid attempt to convey the urgency with which he believed the AFL needed to act to find a better way to keep indigenous players in the league.
“I’ve never had a policy like that in my life,” Rendell said.
“I wouldn’t have a policy like that, it’s ridiculous, silly, everyone’s the same.
“The comment that I made originally was stupidly trying to emphasise the problem that we’ve got at the moment and we need to do something about it quick.
“The AFL need to get involved in it … everyone’s whacking each other, Andrew (Demetriou’s) whacking the whole world.
“What they need to do is get on the right page, the media need to get in with them, they need to fix the problem.
“It’s a problem in the industry.”
