Be dealt with at very leaders aren’t doing it
there was nothing but vitriol etched on the faces of the three fans who yelled abuse at Sterling, including the supporter alleged to have used racially motivated language.
Liverpool player Rhian Brewster added to the condemnation. “Another day another racist incident,” he posted on Twitter. “Embarrassing for it to be happening twice in two weeks in England. Just when you thought things had changed for the better.”
The second, earlier incident had come when a Tottenham supporter
made the media in this country the focus of his response.
In highlighting one particular publication’s double standards, he shone a light on newspapers as a whole, which in turn reflected upon the whole of wider society.
Two up-and-coming footballers have earned unseemly amounts of money before their careers have even really got going and used a large chunk of it to buy their was arrested last week for throwing a banana skin in the direction of PierreEmerick Aubameyang during last Sunday’s north London derby.
Wycombe striker Adebayo Akinfenwa responded to Ferdinand’s aforementioned tweet, saying: “We have to put a stop to this some way.”
Ferdinand replied: “In the NFL the players took to the knee...”
His reference was to the movement sparked by Colin Kaepernick, who was the first to kneel during the US national anthem to protest against
mums a new house. Yet their stories have been given very different treatment in the way they are presented.
Forget Saturday’s in-one-earand-out-the-other abuse. This is clearly something that has gnawed away at Sterling for months and here was his chance to raise it as an issue.
Racist ignorance, he can deal with. Here, he believes, is something much uglier. Racially motivated prejudice. Taken the more institutionalised racism of the country as a whole.
Worryingly, Sterling’s own post on Instagram suggests that to his mind the problem of racism remains endemic in British society – and particularly in the media – rather
In the NFL players took to the knee
separately, both approaches to the facts can be justified editorially. So, Sterling wanted to know, why the discrepancy?
It is a question that Sterling is right to raise. And we owe it to him to ask a few questions of our own.
As a journalist, how would I have treated the two stories? As a reader, what would you have read into them? than isolated to a handful of boorish, idiotic morons.
There is a determined mood at Chelsea that, should it indeed be proved that the comments of this one fan in particular were racist, he should never be allowed to set foot back inside Stamford Bridge. Nor, if they can help it, inside any football stadium in the country.
But it is clear there is a growing concern that still, in the 21st century, racism might not just be an issue with a mindless minority.
And why? Reluctant spokesperson though he is, Sterling has brought home the fact that these are questions we must continue to ask ourselves if we are ever to stand a hope of kicking racism out of football. Not just kicking out the overt racists.
If the supporter at the centre of this abhorrent scene never
sets foot inside a football ground ever again, football will undoubtedly congratulate itself.
But does that mean that we can say the problem really has gone away?
Having sat down recently with Viv Anderson, left, the first black man to play for England, I was given a fascinating insight into just how far football in this country has come. Yesterday, Sterling reminded us just how much further we have to go.