bradley headstone
|
Posted: October 5th 2008
Click here to feedback
Having been away for a week or so (more not being at work than holiday, but refreshing none the less) and not being as exposed to papers, internet or lively pub debate, my only real exposure to football has been when football competed with the credit crunch and Mandelson.
Both bankers and the new saviour of British business are used to suffering volleys of abuse but even they may have baulked at the thousands of homophobic chanters at Fratton Park and the thousands of expletives falling from Clueless Joe Kinnear’s mouth this week. Both might be tempted to find pastures new soon, as difficult as either job may be I doubt either would fancy Newcastle or Tottenham.
For both clubs these incidents are completely different and the contexts should not be confused but its there is a clear theme that links these and many other incidents in football: ignorance and worse still, the tolerance of ignorance.
Football fans have a right to express their opinion in a forthright and instinctive way, it makes the atmosphere what it is and in an age of all seater stadiums and the best seats in the house being taken by corporate clients, it’s vital that this is maintained.
But when it goes too far, and it does in every fixture, every week, it’s got to be stopped at source. Stewarding at nearly every game I’ve been to has been woeful. I’ve witnessed grown men using foul and abusive language whilst standing next to a steward. This is hardly the fault of the individual steward. Where clubs operate their own stewarding the overriding instinct is to jolly the whole thing along, make sure it doesn’t get out of hand and above all make sure nobody important notices. It’s becoming increasingly common for clubs to sub contract their stewarding, this means you get a mixture of moonlighting doormen looking for a reason to ‘get involved’ or a handful of disinterested students with no interest in anything other than an easy shift. In other words clubs have washed their hands of any responsibility here.
You see it at every ground and on the telly, the next time you see Chelsea at home watch their packed stands. It’s an old fashioned ground, the fans are on top of the players and every time the ball goes out of play you’ll see someone screaming at an opposition player, you don’t have to be able to lip read to get the gist. The recent Merseyside derby saw a ‘loveable scouse rogue’ actually strike Phil Neville as he waited to take a throw. I’m sure none of these acts resulted in the fan being spoken to let alone ejected.
What the Spurs fans managed to do was get enough of them together to make sure it couldn’t be ignored. Sol Campbell’s crime is that he left Spurs, not quite in the acrimonious way he left Arsenal (er, are you sure?! – Ed) but both sets of fans are united in thinking it’s ok to scream sexually motivated abuse at him. If six thousand people think that, then something is wrong with football.
I’m not surprised by the Spurs fans’ behaviour, I’ve a family member who supports them and he and his mate happily call themselves ‘yids’. I don’t believe they have any understanding of the term or its context. I’m 99% sure they’d have joined in at Fratton Park too.
When a player abuses a crowd, the book is thrown, no matter what the provocation. Until there is similar zero tolerance with fans then this will remain a feature of our game and one that makes me more and more uncertain about whether I really want to be a part of it.
The element in the Joe Kinnear case is hard to ignore, though with this incident the fact that he managed 50 swear words in 5 minutes is mildly shocking but not without precedence or with the right context is considered acceptable. John Cooper Clarke’s poem Evidently Chicken Town records over 80 uses of the ‘F’ word in 50 lines but still found its way into the Faber Book Of Political Verse.
But Joe’s no poet and quite frankly he’s no manager either. This is where the ignorance lies in this case. For Ashley, Wise etc to compound their original mistake in appointing Keegan with actually believing that Joe Kinnear could actually be trusted with anything bigger than a Pound shop is the real abuse here. Joe’s tirade was laughable but if it had been aimed at those that had employed him, then I suspect the tone of its coverage may have been a little more sympathetic.
The Newcastle debacle rumbles on, whoever eventually gets the job, after Keegan comes back to finish the job he started (takes them down), will have to court the local media. Big Sam knows that now and its step 1 for anyone hoping to turn that ship around.
As for Spurs, their fans’ abusing Campbell is a distraction to their appalling season thus far. But if Levy could find a way of controlling their fans you’d begin to believe he could find a way to run the club.
It’s a long shot, but it just might work.