ONLINE RACE HATE REVEALED BY MICAH
In a new documentary, Richards vows to tackle social media giants
THE new Micah Richards documentary exploring racism in football is nearly at an end when Gary Neville provides testimony which grabs the subject by the scruff of the neck and demands that the sport shakes itself out of complacency.
Neville describes Raheem Sterling approaching him during the 2016 European Championship, when he was ‘struggling’ and felt that he was being targeted for his performances because of the colour of skin.
‘And he was,’ relates Neville, who had been England’s assistant manager at the time. ‘There’s no doubt. I actually offered him no sympathy or anything about the real distress. I told him to concentrate on his football.’
He tells how team-mate Ashley Cole returned to the dressing room having been racially abused while playing for England against Spain in 2004. ‘I didn’t talk to him about it,’ Neville tells Richards (below). ‘The message may have been, “Forget about it Ash. Get on with your football”. I had been complicit in accepting racism in my dressing room.’
This interview — the standout element of the Sky Documentaries film which screens on Monday — is part of an encouraging pattern of white players going on a journey of discovery about prejudice and race.
The one source of optimism in Anton Ferdinand’s devastating recent BBC film — about his racial abuse at the hands of John Terry — was Neil Warnock, Ferdinand’s QPR manager at the time, and Jordan Henderson, his former Sunderland team-mate, describing the same learning.
This has been a long time coming. Two years ago when Moise Keane, then a 19-year-old Juventus player, was told by manager Massimiliano Allegri that he had brought racism on himself, Jason Roberts questioned why it was only black players expressing disgust.
‘It should be for all of football,’ said former Blackburn striker Roberts, who speaks so powerfully that you wonder why he is not at the vanguard of the FA’s attempts to shed the game of this scourge.
Richards’ documentary provides an insight into why bigotry so often goes unchallenged. Those who speak out get the most abuse — the so-called ‘Tall Poppy Syndrome’ — and the Sportsmail columnist is no exception. Images of monkeys and bananas proliferated on his Twitter and Instagram feeds after he supported Black Lives Matter. Chelsea’s Tammy Abraham, Crystal Palace’s Wilfried Zaha and Manchester United’s Paul Pogba get just the same. ‘This is what racism in football often looks like,’ says Richards. ‘Instead of bananas thrown on the pitch, they’re on social media.’ He is given reassurances by Facebook, whose public policy manager he interviews for the film. But there is nothing from Instagram — the platform which allows the kind of direct messaging that saw Zaha abused before an Aston Villa game last year. Richards interviews the Kick It Out organisation’s fan education manager Alan Bush, who runs referral sessions for those caught racially abusing players in stadiums or on social media. To date, all have been white and all male. They range in age from 12 to 52.
‘You can’t just ban your way out of all these incidents,’ Kick It Out’s Sanjay Bhandari told Sportsmail last year. ‘There’s a danger where you issue people with a life ban and that just entrenches them and the views they have.’ Sky’s substantial financial support for Kick It Out, announced late last year, is encouraging. For too long, the organisation was fighting a tide of racism on a shoestring.
This is the kind of progress which Richards’ father, Lincoln, would barely have believed possible as he ran a gauntlet of hate on the touchline while watching his son play for Leeds City Boys in the early 1990s. Father and son had never discussed that until this documentary.
‘He has dreadlocks, my dad, Rastafarian,’ Richards said after completing the film. ‘And people at Leeds City Boys would do casual racism. Sing Bob Marley songs. I would get racially abused on the pitch but he would get more abuse than me. He wouldn’t speak to me about it and I wouldn’t speak to him about it.
‘What can you say to each other? It’s just something in our area we learned to deal with.’
The documentary feels like another step along this road but a reminder, too, of the distance still to travel.
‘I’m more likely to get a coaching job than you because I’m white,’ Neville tells Richards. ‘That’s ridiculous. We should not let this go. Keeping quiet is as bad as being racist.’
Micah Richards: Tackling Racism is available on Sky Documentaries and NOW TV from Monday at 9pm.