Geelong teammates Harry Taylor and Josh Jenkins explain one of the AFL’s most bizarre incidents

‘Ham-gate’ still has footy fans confused to this day. The two players at its centre do their best to set the record straight, but they’re still a fair way apart on the incident.

Josh Jenkins and Harry Taylor are now teammates and have reflected on the ‘ham-gate’ incident of 2017. Picture: Sarah Reed

One of football’s most bizarre incidents in recent memory has finally been explained… sort of.

Geelong defender Harry Taylor and former Adelaide forward Josh Jenkins found themselves embroiled in ‘ham-gate’ after their clash in Round 18, 2017.

Jenkins, ironically now Taylor’s teammate at Geelong, had been bedridden with food poisoning in the lead-up to the now-infamous clash, attributed to some ham he had eaten at a funeral.

After Jenkins’ Crows defeated the Cats and went to shake hands with his opponent, Taylor produced a small amount of ham from his sock, allegedly there for the whole game, and placed it in Jenkins’ palm as they shook hands.

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Jenkins felt sick and was baffled by the move, but hadn’t had the chance to set the record straight with Taylor, who he was not close with at the time, until he moved to Geelong over the off-season.

Speaking to AFL Media, Jenkins and Taylor each gave their version of events on that bizarre Friday night at Adelaide Oval:

JOSH JENKINS: I’d had food poisoning during the week, I went to a buffet for a quick feed, I won’t name the restaurant out of respect, you get to get a free feed in return, but I thought it was the ham, the leg of ham that caused it. So Harry obviously thought “I’ll give him some.”

HARRY TAYLOR: I was sitting in the, it’s like a meeting room essentially before the game and there’s all our food out there you can have for lunch or dinner or whatever and I said to Paddy what about if I tool bit of ham from this carvery of food and put a bit in my sock.

JOSH: Obviously he’s just gone this’ll be funny or this’ll, whatever.

HARRY: And then if I saw Josh after, give it to him and just said you know, how you feeling? A bit of a joke, a bit of a gag. We lost the game unfortunately. I played OK, Josh played pretty well. I just shook his hand after with the ham in my hand and said, “All the best going forward.”

JOSH: When I retrieved my arm and hand, there was ham in there. That’s about as much as I can offer.

HARRY: I’m not sure he took it the right way, I’m not sure he knew exactly where I was coming from and that’s where things got a bit blurred, and the media grabbed it and thought it was bigger than maybe it was. It took a little bit for me to, you know, talk to him about it because I wasn’t sure exactly where he sat, but we spent a car ride to one of our alternate training facilities together and I just made sure that we were both on the same page with it and he had a laugh and I had a laugh.

JOSH: It wasn’t in depth, it was just a little, “Hope you didn’t take offence to it.” And that was it, and I didn’t. I thought it was strange but I didn’t take offence to it.

HARRY: It would have been five grams (of ham) if that, just a very small amount.

JOSH: I don’t know, 85 grams (of ham).

Originally published as Geelong teammates Harry Taylor and Josh Jenkins explain one of the AFL’s most bizarre incidents