Lions do their utmost but it’s a bigger issue

DEEP-ROOTED SOCIAL PROBLEMS EXIST

DO YOU know what the score was? I’ll always remember the opening gambit of the halfcut teenager spoiling for a scrap at South Bermondsey station.

A wiser man would have feigned ignorance, shrugged, wandered off to a more populated slab of platform.

But I was 25, new to London and covering my first game in the Football League as a trainee reporter. So I told him. Millwall had beaten Bristol City 1-0.

“You Bristol, then?” he asked, wilfully ignorant of my obvious Newcastle accent. Stupidly, I told him I was a journalist. “Yeah?” he said. “You been writing bad stuff about us like all the others?”

So began a fairly torrid five-minute ordeal as the lad and his mates spat insults into my face, threw mock punches and waited for the slightest spark of reaction.

Thankfully, I was saved from a hiding by mute passivity and the fortuitous eruption of passengers from a London-bound train.

Typical Millwall, I thought, lurching off to safety. Thugs. Knuckleheads. Scum. Theirs was a reputation earned, not sensationalised.

Looking back, however, those lads weren’t Millwall fans. Not really. They hadn’t attended the game. They weren’t wearing replica shirts. They were just lairy kids angling for a fight, the type you see in every town centre, every Friday night. Supporting Millwall was an excuse – a flimsy means of justifying violence.

Had that incident occurred in Coventry or Carlisle, I probably wouldn’t have conflated their actions with hooligan culture at all.

Reputation

According to Millwall CEO Steve Kavanagh, we are all guilty of viewing the club through the prism of their reputation.

Of using them, in the words of former Lions chairman Reg Burr, as a “convenient coat peg for football to hang its social ills on”.

“This isn’t just a MIllwall thing,” said Kavanagh after footage emerged of supporters chanting racial insults during the weekend’s 3-2 victory over Everton in the FA Cup.

“This happens across society. As Millwall Football Club, we can’t be responsible for educating the whole of south east London.”

It is tempting to dismiss those words as one-eyed tribalism.

Nevertheless, Kavanagh has a point.

Hatred is not Millwall’s problem. It is not even football’s problem.

Statistics released in October showed that crimes directed at people in England and Wales because of their religion or ethnicity rose by 40 per cent from 2017 to 2018. During the same period, violent crime went up by 29 per cent.

Why? It depends who you ask, but there is a welter of evidence and a plenty of historical context pointing to poverty as a primary driver. Deprivation, anger and frustration are the kindling that spark the flames of hate and violence.

Southwark, the borough where Millwall reside, has some of the highest rates of poverty and unemployment in London – just as it did in the 80s.

That is not to excuse racist chanting, less still the fighting that marred the same fixture and left one Everton fan in hospital. Nor is it to suggest that everyone on the breadline is a thug.

Irresponsible

But it is disingenuous - and irresponsible of anyone in authority - to argue that football, let alone one club, should single-handedly tackle deep-rooted social problems that happen to manifest themselves on the terraces.

The game can set an example, and Millwall certainly have. The Lions have worked tirelessly to ban offenders and clean up their image, but they are butting against issues far beyond their means and remit.

Because football is not the problem; it is only ever an excuse.