Carl bloody Griffiths. A journeyman 90s footballer most of you have probably forgotten, that is if you were even aware of him in the first place. However, his name is forever etched in my memory.
May 1st 1999. I’m at Vale Park, in a crowd of 9,851. That alone should tell you this isn’t a run of the mill Port Vale home game. Both Vale and my beloved QPR are waist deep in the relegation mire, it’s the classic six pointer, and Rangers have some 4,500 fans in attendance.
Many memories of the day are clear. Sunny. Wore a cool Stan Bowles t shirt (inability to replace it years later due to the company concerned having disappeared being a partial inspiration for goalfood). Rangers were on top for 20 minutes, missed some sitters, then were crap for the remainder of the game.
Clearest memory of all, though, is Carl bloody Griffiths. I’d not have remembered the name had he simply scored Vale’s second in the 66th minute and consigned us to defeat. Oh no. The reason I remember Carl is his goal celebration. He had plenty of options. His momentum could easily have seen him wheel away to the right to celebrate with one of the more vocal sections of the home crowd (a section, incidentally, many of whom change ends at half time – “just like the old days”). He could have gone ballistic with his team mates. He could have run back calmly but determinedly to the centre circle, thus giving a message to team mates and fans alike that this game, this relegation dogfight, ain’t over yet, no siree. He could have run towards the bench with a “that one’s for you gaffer” clenched fist, or waved at his family in the main stand.
Carl, tho’, had different ideas. Carl decided to celebrate in front of the away fans. Big time. Goading. Taunting. Laughing. Carl nearly caused a riot. Fans of both teams tried to get on the pitch in the corner nearest to where he’d indulged in his antics. On what was already a tense enough afternoon, tempers boiled over. For the remainder of the match it all threatened to kick off. Outside after the game, it did.
For several seasons afterwards, two sets of fans who’d rarely given each other a second thought before Carl bloody Griffiths scored that bloody goal clashed regularly.
The other reason it stands out in my memory is that it was the first time I’d seen a player so blatantly taunt the opposition fans. There was no QPR / Griffiths history, he hadn’t been singled out for any particular abuse. Indeed Griffiths’ stats show he only spent a few months at Vale Park, surely not sufficient time for him to develop any special bond with the club.
He was just being an idiot.
Through the noughties, the “wind up the oppo fans celebration” has become increasingly commonplace, arguably reaching an embarrassingly public nadir with Jose Mourinho’s “shh” gesture to Liverpool fans at the 2005 Carling Cup Final.
Arguably the odd one has been almost justified, such as David Beckham’s ear cupping at a time when he was weekly having to put up with particularly vicious chants about his wife. Others have shown a sheer stupidity that makes Carl bloody Griffiths look like a paragon of virtue. Is it any surprise to see one Wayne Rooney atop the stupidity charts? You’re a dyed in the wool Evertonian…playing for Man United…at Anfield…so you decide to celebrate a goal by dancing like a loon in front of the Kop…and wonder why you have missiles thrown at you…
For me, though, the debate about just how inflammatory a celebration is should be redundant. We’re football fans, we’re passionate, we get carried away – one individual winding us up en masse is asking for trouble. Trouble that could easily be avoided if you just celebrated with your team mates, or with your own fans, dammit, people who want to reach over advertising hoardings to hug you rather than spit at you, blind you with a 50p coin or knock you out with a well aimed mobile phone.
Don’t give me the “if fans can dish it out to players they should be able to take it in return” line. It just doesn’t work like that. Emotions may run equally highly for both players and fans, but the crowd by definition has a mob mentality. In the crowd we all say and do things we wouldn’t away from the match. A crowd pushed to the limit can be a dangerous thing. Players? Whatever buzz they get from a goal, however important it is, whatever abuse they’ve endured from oppo fans…there’s no excuse for starting a riot. As already stated, there are many more positive ways to celebrate.
However, there is a catch here. Players celebrating with their own supporters are routinely booked. Players who goad the opposition supporters almost always get away with it (unless you do a Gary Neville and run the length of the pitch to do it – mind you I saw Clive Allen get away with this in a highly charged QPR v Palace Cup quarter final way back).
Ever since Carl bloody Griffiths, I have ranted on and on about this anomaly to anyone who’ll listen (and many who didn’t want to). Each season, more and more players are getting a yellow for celebrating with their own fans; more and more are getting away with winding up the opposition. MADNESS.
So there I was a couple of weeks ago watching MOTD, only paying partial attention to the commentary, and whilst aware of the day’s results, not having read any match reports. Suddenly my Geordie wife is getting agitated as Mido scores in the Tyne-Tees derby at the Riverside, then blatantly mocks the away end. Anger turns to a knowing smile as he is booked. Yes, my long suffering other half has had to endure my rant on this pet hate of mine more than anyone, so we are both relieved to see this outburst of common sense from Mike Dean…maybe even from FIFA…we’ve been on holiday, so for all we know they’ve issued a directive to refs on this very matter.
Alas no. Midogate was different. This wasn’t Rooney reacting to Shrek taunts, Lampard reacting to being called fat, Beckham angered at 10,000 people crudely questioning Posh’s sexual preferences. Mido was reacting to the suggestion from some of the Toon Army that he was a suicide bomber.
This takes us into different territory altogether. First and foremost, racism. Spain and Italy still have many problems with racist chanting, it is rife in eastern Europe, Scottish football is undergoing all manner of soul searching about the ongoing sectarian chanting. In England, however, whilst our crowds may not be blemish-free on the issue, we’re light years ahead of the aforementioned nations (well a good couple of decades at least). As Nick Hornby wisely opined in Fever Pitch, “it’s not much to be grateful for, really, the fact that a man calls another man a c*** but not a black c***”. But hey, progress such as this needs to be applauded, however snail-paced it might be.
So have we “kicked racism out of football”, as the FA’s ongoing campaign regularly asks us to do, well meaningly but ever so slightly ham-fistedly? Well no, we haven’t. What can be said confidently is that overt anti-black racism is very rare, Ron Atkinson asides aside. The number of black faces both in management and in the crowds may still be disproportionately low, but the pioneering, brave work of several generations of black players has ensured that this is a problem that slowly but surely will also be conquered.
There is regular debate (most recently a whole night dedicated to it on Five Live) about the lack of Asian players / supporters in the game, but in the era of Amir Khan and Monty Panesaar, it’s to be hoped that what once seemed insurmountable barriers for would be Asian footballers will be just that little bit easier to overcome…and that with it chants such as “I’d rather be a Paki than a (insert name of prejudice here)” will become as universally frowned upon as the monkey noises and banana throwing which was commonplace in the 70s and early 80s.
Back to Mido, and why this is such an interesting case. The issue of racism in football is, if you’ll excuse the lame pun, black and white. The issue of the relationship between fans and players (what is acceptable as regards banter / provocation from the former and reaction from the latter) is a much greyer area – as my gripe about yellow cards demonstrates. With the Mido incident, we arguably saw both issues encapsulated in one brief but highly charged moment.
nufc.com, the most visited of the Toon Army’s unofficial websites and highly recommended, concluded of Midogate that, “it's called terrace humour - it's cruel, bawdy, coarse, always offensive to someone and often not funny.” True. However, when they suggest Mido is one of those players that opposition fans always love to bait, I beg to differ. Has Mido’s reputation really reached Savage-esque proportions just yet? Equally, when they put it in the same bracket as chants about Sammy Lee being a dwarf, I disagree.
To be fair, nufc.com’s piece does allude to the anti-semitic chants that are still a staple diet of the terrace repertoire for many a club when playing Spurs, and point out how until he switched allegiance in the summer, Mark Viduka was always a “fat aussie bastard” as far as the Toon Army was concerned. And they go on to pose the question that few of us are brave enough to give an unequivocal answer to: who defines what is religious or sectarian abuse and just exactly how do you police it?
Naturally this brings us onto the wider debate about what should be deemed acceptable subject matter for terrace chanting (look, “all-seater stadia humour” just doesn’t sound right, ok?). Except there’s a limit to how much worthwhile time can be spent on this debate. Much as there should be no grey area when it comes to chants about Munich, Hillsborough, the Teesside child abuse scandal or (as noted in Tim Parks’ A Season in Verona) earthquake victims, there will always be a small percentage of fans who will indulge in them. Youthful bravado, genuine hatred of their opponents, a simple desire to shock, being stupidly pissed – all of these and more are contributory factors. And to roll out the old cliché, society’s got to change before that sort of thing disappears.
With regards to those chanting against Mido, they have gone through the thought process as to what will most wind up their target. It’s his race they’ve settled upon. That they then make the next step (“Arab = muslim = terrorist”) is arguably following precisely the same sort of logic that led to the monkey chants and banana throwing that used to be endured by black players (and as noted earlier, still are in several countries).
Thus I can’t help concluding that chanting "Mido, he's got a bomb you know" or "he's gonna blow in a minute", or in the case of the West Ham fans when Mido was still at Spurs, “shoe shoe shoe bomber” is plain racist, and anything other than condemnation of it is copping out*. Any other reaction could, in its own small way, help to start undo a lot of the good work that has been done in the last few years (both in football and in society as a whole) as we adapt to being a multi-racial / cultural nation, with our domestic football reflecting that fact.
(* at this point I should point out that nufc.com did conclude by stating “In reality it's all regrettable and avoidable and makes us look like a bunch of clowns”).
I’m still glad Mido was yellow carded. Players must continually be aware of their responsibilities. Gareth Southgate can bleat on all he likes about the abuse of civil liberties when one man is booked for failing to control his emotions whilst the 3,000 provoking him remain unpunished, but as reasoned above, that misses the point.
I hope the reaction to his booking doesn’t prevent other refs from following Mike Dean’s lead, and equally I hope that at some point, the football authorities realise the stupidity inherent in carding a player for celebrating with his own fans. And I hope that we as fans don’t allow a situation to develop where football once again becomes a fertile recruiting ground for the far right.
.
