the Premiership- a lesson

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September 17, 2003

Weep for supporters segregated from sanity

By Martin Samuel, Sports Writer of the Year

 

AND SO it has come to this.On page seven of the matchday programme for the game against Manchester United last Saturday, Charlton Athletic plc printed its new segregation policy. It appeared like a suicide note from the time of sanity. Read it yourself, and weep.

 

Stay on the right side

 

Charlton have vowed to operate a zero tolerance policy regarding visiting fans in home areas following an unprecedented number of ejections and relocations during the last home match against Everton.

 

An investigation has discovered that the source of the tickets used by many of the fans were Charlton supporters and now the club has warned that any visiting fan found in home areas will face immediate ejection, with the source of their ticket also traced and the original purchaser facing an immediate ban from The Valley and from purchasing tickets for future Charlton matches.

 

Charlton chief executive Peter Varney said: “While it would be wonderful to see fans mingling happily inside stadiums this is simply not going to happen in the near future. We cannot allow opposing fans to openly support their team within home areas, be it by wearing colours or cheering a goal as this contravenes stadium regulations.”

 

Even though the visiting fans may not necessarily cause trouble, they are breaching ground regulations merely by sitting in home areas.

 

Goodbye then, cruel world. Goodbye tolerance and humanity. Goodbye community, goodbye social responsibility. We have been reduced to this abomination: football-shirt apartheid. What was once a sport of shared emotion is now at the mercy of a vocal few whose fanatical bigotry renders them incapable of sitting beside a man wearing a different colour. Minds are now so small that cheering your team has been rendered an offence.

 

Nobody has to misbehave these days. The crime is being foreign, being different; the sin is to not be one of us. The Pogues sang that the Birmingham Six did time for being Irish in the wrong place. Football now treads the same path, every supporters’ club its little master race.

 

The saving grace of sport as a common denominator has been eroded. In the dark days when a former Prime Minister would gladly have seen football go the same way as trade unions and society, lovers of the game advocated its worth as a forger of common bonds. For every hooligan, there were a thousand law-abiding men and women, we argued. For every sidestreet brawl, there were a hundred roads walked down by supporters celebrating life and shared experience through football. And we are told that we won that battle against hooliganism. So where are they now, the sane ones, the ones who appreciate that, beneath the overpriced polyester, there really is no difference between a blue shirt and a red one? We debate the merits of travel to Istanbul. But how can we be trusted to sit with the Turks if we haven’t yet learnt how to sit with each other?

 

In March 2000, Bradford City played Leeds United at Valley Parade in the West Yorkshire derby. Leeds won 2-1 and, when the first goal was scored, a mother and her teenage daughter in the main stand got up to cheer. That was all they did. Cheer their team. They showed no malice to the Bradford fans around them, there were no taunts, not so much as a smug grin — indeed, Bradford season ticket-holders must have been their friends who provided tickets for that area. What followed, however, was a depressing sign of the times, the portent of Charlton’s admission of defeat in the face of segregated madness.

 

Bradford fans — normal supporters that had previously demonstrated no leanings toward mental deficiency — rounded on the pair with threats and foul abuse. They wanted them thrown out; they demanded it in the most violent way. Had the interlopers been male, there would almost certainly have been some form of physical confrontation.

 

Instead, concerned by the situation unfolding before his eyes, Peter Ridsdale, the Leeds chairman, intervened and the Leeds fans were allowed to take refuge in the directors’ box and watch the rest of the match from there. And all they did was cheer their team. It felt like the beginning of the end.

 

Fast-forward some years and in another Valley they have run up the white flag. It is not the fault of the club. It is not the fault of a large number of its supporters. Yet those who are to blame grow in numbers weekly. Increasingly it feels as if the violence did not go away but was supplemented by a vile and damaging hatred among those who used to bring something more worthwhile to the ground than a boss-eyed devotion to one team. If anything, segregation is now bringing out the worst in otherwise rational human beings.

 

Time was, hooligans were hooligans. You knew who they were and you steered well clear. I can remember arriving late for a game between West Ham United and Aston Villa at Upton Park. It was after kick-off, my mates had gone in and I dived for the first South Bank entrance. As I made my way down the terrace, West Ham broke the habit of a lifetime and scored an early goal. I reacted accordingly and was quickly made aware by the surrounding silence that either I had entered the new Coolly Detached Enclosure or I was in the away end by mistake.

 

A guy asked me if I was a West Ham fan. He had Sex Pistols badges on his scarf and, being a 13-year-old proto-punk, I decided at least I was going to get my head kicked in by someone with a decent record collection. Then his mate asked if I wanted a Polo. They were no trouble. I was no trouble. I’m sure somebody was that day but they didn’t bother us. That is how I remember the notorious late Seventies. There was a fight to be had if you wanted to have it. If you didn’t, you watched the football and had a laugh.

 

Reading the Charlton programme, it doesn’t sound quite like that any more. Now there is a row whether you want it or not. Valley law no longer distinguishes between the hooligan and the supporter, between the sane and the mad. Cheering your team from the wrong stand is now an offence — but football’s idiocy runs deeper.

 

Just being identified as a supporter of a rival club will get you ejected. So one word out of place, one reference to “our” right back or the failure to boo the names of the away team as they are read out, could soon be cause for ejection.

 

It is not unfeasible that a fan one day could be removed for refusing to abuse an opposition striker. “Well, officer. We were calling Ruud van Nistelrooy a horse-faced [***!!***] and that man there wasn’t saying anything. He’s clearly from Manchester.”

 

“Right, mate. Start making neighing noises now or I’ll have to take you away. Sorry, but it’s the law.”

 

My brother found himself on the wrong side of these rules at The Valley last season. He didn’t stand up when West Ham scored, but he didn’t stand up for a Charlton goal, either. That was enough. By the end of the game, which Charlton won 4-2, he had a teenage girl in the next seat standing up and shouting “you’re not singing any more” in his left ear. The fact that he wasn’t singing in the first place seemed not to matter.

 

We are breeding a generation of football watchers that have been allowed to live life in a bubble, unchallenged by the thoughts, concerns or presence of rival supporters. Don’t forget, this was at Charlton, a club that is traditionally one of the friendliest in the Premiership. Welcome to hell, it isn’t. The nearest rivals are Millwall and even they don’t hate Charlton as much as West Ham or Chelsea. Or Cardiff City, Stoke City, Birmingham City.

 

Yet somehow, segregation has turned Charlton’s fans nasty — and a lot of others, too. Prejudice is now confused with passion, positive and negative intensity have become one. It is a tragic misapprehension. For the record, being entirely intolerant of others is not the same as supporting your team; it does, however, feature in some manifestations of mental illness.

 

This is not to remove the fun from the process. I’m not up for telling anyone how to watch football. But I’m not up for telling anyone how not to watch it, either — certainly not somebody who has travelled 200 miles, got a ticket from a Charlton-supporting friend, then finds himself ejected because the bloke behind isn’t grown up enough to sit with somebody who took his allegiances from a Merseyside playground rather than a Kent one. Attacks on players, bizarre rants on radio — that’s right, mate, what has Sir Alex Ferguson ever done for Manchester United? — it is all part of the same malaise. I may not go as much as I used to, but if there was a fans’ charter, the right to shout your team on and to avoid ejection from the ground if you weren’t misbehaving would be pretty near the top of the list.

 

Isolation doesn’t make a nation more tolerant culturally and football-shirt apartheid is beginning to fail for the same reasons. Is the end of segregation the answer? Not instantly. But the divide will never be crossed unless we feel our way back with at least one part of the ground open to those who quite liked the days when you could spy a fan of the other side without then pointing him out to security for having the wrong accent or not making flying-fist gestures at his own players.

 

And, yes, I know. The press get in for nothing. How can we understand the thoughts of real fans, the emotions, the devotion? I’ll write the e-mails myself and save time. But then I’ll put my hand in my pocket, as I often do when I’m not working, and pay to watch West Ham play Millwall on September 28. Just as I did when I was a teenager, just as we did when we saw West Ham play Charlton at The Valley in the League Cup twenty-odd years ago. Sat in the main stand with my Dad and Grandad. We couldn’t do it now, of course. Well, Grandad’s dead — but so is sanity.