Italy is blighted by racism, but vile incidents in our game have never gone away
WHEN Eni Aluko suggested she would have to take security if visiting The Den, there were a few replies on her social media account.
One of them, from someone calling him or herself Lagboat and purporting to be a Millwall fan, read: “You’d need it to. Black Women have been lynched in the concourse before.”
When Aluko drew attention to the tweet, another user suggested there was clear sarcasm in the post.
Yeah, right.
Another replied: “**** me diane Abbott is more on the ball than you #thick****.”
And these messages were still out there hours later.
They might still be out there. Twitter had announced earlier in the week that it had taken action on “more than 700 examples of hateful conduct” in the two weeks since high- profile players, such as Paul Pogba and Tammy Abraham, had been racially abused on its platform.
Someone might want to tell Twitter that disgusting bigotry and online racial hatred runs deeper than the Premier League.
But at least it is a start, I guess.
Aluko, now playing for Juventus, drew the responses by contrasting the £ 50,000 fine imposed on Huddersfield Town for their bookmakersponsored kit stunt with the £ 10,000 fine handed down to Millwall after some of their supporters chanted “I’d rather be a P*** than a Scouse” during last season’s home FA Cup tie against Everton.
For greater effect, Aluko could have highlighted the £200,000 fine given to Leeds for having a bloke peep over a fence to watch Derby County train. But her point is a salient one.
If the FA and the Football League wished to explain the discrepancy, they would probably point out that the Huddersfield and Leeds “offences” were committed by the club.
Millwall have made strenuous efforts to tackle discrimination, but cannot gag followers who want to sing offensive songs, they would argue. But the differing scales of punishment only remind us that racism still exists in the English game.
And if we needed reminding further, Marcus Rashford suggested things are “going backwards” when it comes to dealing with the problem. Last week, Romelu Lukaku was racially abused by Cagliari supporters and then a section of his own club’s fans, Inter Milan ultras, actually tried to suggest the monkey chants and other vile gestures and noises were somehow not “genuinely” racist, but some sort of mark of respect.
Quite rightly, the incident and fallout were highlighted as a reminder of how Italian football is still blighted by racism.
But right now, English football must continue to look at itself.
And while it is primarily the job of social media companies to deal with the online racists, the drive to make the sport more inclusive and rid it of racism has to be intensified.
What happened in Italy last weekend – and what happens there on a depressingly regular basis – has to be put in the spotlight.
But Eni Aluko and Marcus Rashford are right to keep shining a light on the problem closer to home.