Wilshere was wrong but the real abuse still goes unpunished
JACK WILSHERE is an enormously talented footballer. Sadly, his talent is occasionally tainted by spasms of foolishness, the latest of which – an abusive hand gesture to Manchester City fans — brought him a two-match suspension. Arsenal made no protest, Wilshere (pictured below) took his punishment, and everybody agreed that players must not offend their public.
And yet, for a good many of that public, quite different standards apply. They can do and say pretty much what they choose, in the certain knowledge that no sanction will follow.
There are one or two topics which are thankfully intolerable: overt racism is in full retreat and homophobia is finally becoming extinct. But, by and large, they can cheerfully screech the kind of insults and obscenities which would see them arrested were they to repeat them in the High Street.
In almost every match I have attended this season, the visiting supporters have announced themselves with chorus upon dullwitted chorus of: ‘Your support is f*****g s***!’ A section of the home fans responds with the rhetorical question: ‘Who the f*****g hell are you?’, and thus the mindless tone is set.
So familiar is this odious ritual that, after an initial wince, we no longer hear it. The four-letter shrieks have become a kind of aural wallpaper, or what that smarmy army of marketing men like to call: ‘The match-day experience.’ And since it does not register, it goes unreported.
Some of us who covered football in the days before the Heysel disaster remember with a remorseful pang how we rarely mentioned outbreaks of hooliganism. They were part and parcel of the game; they happened on practically every ground, every week. To detail violent excesses was to draw attention to the thugs. And so we ignored them.
Similarly with racism; the vile chanting, the throwing of bananas, the vile insults directed at those of a different colour. There were days when a simple football match felt like a National Front convention. But again we ignored it, reluctant to provide the racists with the oxygen of publicity. Again we were wrong to do so.
And our fear is that a similar process is taking place; dimly understood and largely unrecorded.
Those who take their football from television are sheltered from the full impact of strident abuse. Television tends to present a sanitised version of reality. Obnoxious chants are subtly muted, exchanges of obscenities are reduced to mere ‘banter’, while the talking heads in the studio are not expected to dwell on the eruptions of ugliness.
The Premier League goes to inordinate lengths to project a rose-tinted, soft-focus, familyoriented image of its competition. The ‘product’ must be pristine, and any broadcaster which disrups that cosy collaboration would expect to pay the price.
The outcome is therefore a conspiracy of silence; if we all pretend that it’s not really happening then, who knows, it might just go away. Sadly, the signs are not hopeful.
I recently spoke to a man who had taken his 10-year-old nephew to a London Premier League ground. The man was an infrequent attender, while the youngster was making his first visit. They endured the mutual embarrassment of the explicit chanting, but they were then confronted by the behaviour of three middle-aged supporters.
Their language was shrill and threatening. They stood all through the first half, obscuring the view of those behind, oafishly challenging the away fans in another stand. At half-time, the uncle sought out a club steward to complain. The steward was sympathetic, but totally impotent. ‘I know what you mean’, he said. ‘They’re like that every week. But what can we do?’
The pair left before the end, the child tearfully disappointed and the uncle vowing never to return.
Similar tales are told all around the country as the game piles up the kind of problems which will come back to curse it. And the real victims are the innocent fans, the people who travel extraordinary distances and suffer chilling discomfort to follow the team they love and the game they cherish.
Football has never treated them well, and with extortionate pricing and unreasonable, television-dictated kick-off times, their condition has not improved. If they should decide that enough is enough, then the foul-mouthed fellow-travellers will have won.
A repellent bunch, they delight in screeching lurid, viciously personalised insults. Yet, amazingly, their own skin is gossamer thin. Let a player offer even the mildest response, and off they flounce to tweet their boundless, witless indignation.
So, yes, Jack Wilshere was wrong to raise a derisive finger to his tormentors last week, and he was properly punished. And yet he deserves a twinge of sympathy. For the serious problems remain. And football has yet to scratch the surface.