It’s heart-warming to see fans pull together over Muamba tragedy
IF there’s one positive thing that has come out of Fabrice Muamba’s shocking situation, it’s that football fans CAN act with some class and dignity.
Supporters of clubs across the land have joined hands in praying that the Bolton player recovers from the cardiac arrest he suffered in Saturday’s FA Cup tie at White Hart Lane.
Flowers, scarves and messages of goodwill have been laid at Bolton’s Reebok Stadium and the London Chest Hospital where the 23-yearold remains in a critical condition.
Cynics will mock of course – they always do. It’s faux outrage, they say.
But is it any more false than the behaviour of thousands of fans every weekend at football games all around the country?
Mocking the dead, questioning sexuality, accusing people of paedophilia, casual racism – it’s all in a day’s work for far too many supporters.
And why are so many fans seemingly a hair-trigger away from kicking shit out of an opposing supporter?
Anyone who has had the dubious pleasure of sitting in the ‘wrong end’ at a football match will know what I’m talking about. are to breathe the wrong accent, or applaud the wrong team’s play, and nine times out of ten you’ll be met with a plume of spit, a contorted face and a shaking fist.
And why? Because you like one set of over-paid millionaires more than another?
Yet these people who abuse, fight,
Dspit, swear and act like cavemen denied their piece of dinosaur flesh will then trot home and cuddle the baby, kiss the wife and settle down to The Antiques Roadshow.
Too many treat football as a bubble – a separate world where they can behave how they wish without consequence – and f*** anyone who gets in their way.
You only have to venture onto social networking sites for an insight into the world of the football moron.
Over the weekend, a Swansea University student was arrested for making “racially offensive” comments about Muamba on Twitter.
On Sunday ‘Fabrice Muamba RIP’ was a trending topic on the site because so many sickos had included it in their posts. ut for the majority of people the ‘football mask’ slipped for once.
Everyone remembered they were human after all and all of a sudden the petty point-scoring, name-calling and baiting was shown up for what it really is – a load of insignificant bollocks.
Muamba’s cardiac arrest put things into perspective – but it SHOULDN’T take something as shocking as that to put things into perspective. Fans should be able to find their moral compass without the prod a super-fit footballer fighting for his life provides.
Bill Shankly once famously said: “Football’s not a matter of life and death – it’s much more important than that.”
Shankly got a lot of things right but he got that so, so wrong.
B