The anti-Semitic chants that show Russia is not the only racist nation
IT was early last Saturday evening when I left the Emirates after Arsenal’s victory over Spurs. I got the Tube from Holloway Road to King’s Cross St Pancras and walked to the Hammersmith & City line platform to get another train to Paddington.
There was a small group of Arsenal fans ahead of me who looked like they’d had a big afternoon. There were five or six lads and a couple of young women. I walked past them into the middle of the platform. They started singing a song. If you’re a football fan, the odds are, sadly, that you will be familiar with it.
‘We’ll be running around Tottenham with our willies hanging out,’ they yelled in the middle of the busy platform, ‘singing I’ve got a foreskin, haven’t you? F***ing Jew.’ They managed a couple of renditions of the chant and then the train arrived and they were gone.
This is London in 2017. This is a part of English football in 2017. Let’s not pretend it is an isolated occurrence either.
Chelsea fans were filmed singing a version of the same chant before their FA Cup semi-final against Spurs at Wembley last April. It often happens when teams play Spurs. It is passed off as a quirk of British football culture.
I’m aware of the twisted attempts to justify songs like it, the claims that race-based abuse is somehow OK because some Spurs fans call themselves ‘Yids’.
That was what shocked me about these chants: not the chant itself because, however sickening it is, I’ve heard it before. It was more the sense that it was almost routine.
It is strange how quick people in England are to recognise these sinister manifestations of racial hatred in other nations and how slow they can be to acknowledge that they exist in their own society. If that behaviour happened on the Moscow underground, it would be used as evidence of Russia’s toxic football culture.
When the draw is made in the Kremlin on Friday for next year’s World Cup, it will probably spawn a new series of discussions about racism in Russian football and society and whether the country should have been awarded the tournament in the first place.
And it will be a legitimate debate because Russian football has been disfigured by racism in recent years. In 2013 Manchester City complained after Yaya Toure was subjected to monkey chants from the crowd during a Champions League game against CSKA Moscow.
The Brazilian forward, Hulk, said racist chants were aimed at him nearly every time he played for Zenit Saint Petersburg. And in September, Liverpool winger Bobby Adekanye was racially abused by home fans during an Under 19 fixture against Spartak Moscow in the Russian capital.
Why should there be one set of standards for Russia and another in England? You cannot scream for sanctions when it happens in Russia or Spain or Italy but look the other way when fans of English clubs sing anti-Semitic songs. It’s excused as part of British football culture – pretending it is not relevant to wider society.
There are suggestions that some progress has been made in tackling racism issues in the Russian game. The number of incidents involving racist abuse fell last season compared with the season before.
They have moved on since Alexei Smertin, the ex-Chelsea player and now Russia’s antiracism and discrimination inspector, said there was no racism in Russian football because racism did not exist in Russia.
That was a comedy denial that was treated with the contempt that it deserved. But Smertin also pointed out recently that racism is not just a problem in Russian football. In his country, he said, it was largely propagated by small groups of thugs, just like the little mob I ran into on that platform.
So before any more wringing of hands about the prospect of the World Cup being defiled by being held in Russia, take a closer look at the English talent for denial too. The truth is, England is pretty good at it.