We can teach Serbs how to tackle racism
IT IS not always easy being the man in the Football Association blazer. In Bulgaria, in 2011, a section of the home crowd targeted Ashley Young with racist abuse.
After the game, FA officials made it plain to uEFA and their Bulgarian counterparts that this was unacceptable. They wished to complain. They wished to file a report. This was met with incomprehension. It was only a small section of the crowd, the FA were told.
Adrian Bevington, managing director of Club England, remembers it differently. ‘It was pretty much all of one stand,’ he told me in Krakow last summer, during the European Championship.
The FA, like many, did not know at the time what to expect in Poland and ukraine. In the end, the tournament passed off with very little incident.
That does not mean the problem in some corners of eastern Europe has gone away, however.
As was proved during the London Olympics, people are on their best behaviour when the eyes of the world are watching. Serbia could quite possibly hold an uneventful major tournament, too.
Ethics, however, are what we do when nobody is watching: and uEFA under 21 matches exist in relative obscurity.
Audio footage and eyewitness accounts suggest a lot of people took the opportunity to be overtly racist in Krusevac on Tuesday. A lot.
So what will uEFA do this time? Another £ 16,000 fine, as happened in 2007?
Those who were present in Barcelona on March 29, 2000, when England defeated Yugoslavia 3-0 in a European under 21 Championship play- off, will recall it was no better for Emile Heskey that night, either.
And this is the problem the FA face. This country is miles ahead in its attitude to racism. Years of a zero-tolerance approach has evolved English football to such an extent that it can name and shame almost on an individual basis.
When a Liverpool fan was suspected of racist abuse in the aftermath of the Luis Suarez affair, it was back-page news. One fan.
It would be impossible to identify all of those willing to taunt Danny Rose (below) with monkey chants in Krusevac; there were simply too many.
This makes it awkward for the FA. They arrive in certain countries with their heightened sensibilities and are treated like malcontents.
BEVINGTON said that when the chanting began in Sofia, FA officials were checking and double-checking with each other to ensure they were not mishearing. They knew any protest would be initially doubted. So it was in Serbia.
The hosts are refusing to entertain accusations of racist behaviour and the match officials, from Turkey, would appear to be hard of hearing, too. Listen to the audio. It happened.
We are further on than many of our hosts. The idea of a large group targeting one player for his ethnicity horrifies us.
We are appalled by the backlash against Patrice Evra and Anton Ferdinand, or by the thought that a section of the crowd at Millwall went after Marvin Sordell of Bolton Wanderers when he visited The Den on October 6.
In Bulgaria that night and perhaps in Serbia, too, unless half of the stadium had joined in, the boneheads could be dismissed as a minority, even if that minority was in the hundreds or thousands.
David James, the former England goalkeeper, made a point about racism in English football last week and was not thanked for his outspokenness.
‘I think the organisations that have done so much good combating racism on the terraces are still employed looking for stuff to shout about,’ he said. ‘ I think that some people have an agenda to keep themselves in existence.’
Whether one agrees or not, this shows the extent to which the conversation has developed in English football. We are now at the stage of discussing nuance. The worth of pressure groups; the rehabilitation of miscreants; crime and punishment.
We are still behind the united States, where there is a black president, a black first family, and a significant number of black professionals in the top jobs and dining in every upscale restaurant, but we have moved on from an era when people needed telling it was not right to compare black men to monkeys. Is James correct? Is a pressure group like Kick It Out increasingly redundant? Yes and no.
While there are still only four black managers in the English game and few black executives, no one could suggest there are not legitimate questions to be asked.
Yet for every individual race case to become this disproportionate media storm of soundbites and grand-standing is ultimately counter-productive — do we really need to hear from Lord Triesman on a daily basis once again?
The investigations into the actions of Suarez and John Terry were necessary. But the furore around the cases and the length of time taken to reach a resolution, with the many claims and rebuttals, has not aided football.
If anything, views have become more entrenched and more extreme. Ferdinand was booed during a Premier League game at West Bromwich Albion this month, when the issue is nothing to do with that club.
The total eradication of racist thought would be a utopian aim for society and it is for football, too. There will always be one guy, one girl, who has missed the meeting.
The process should be punishment, education and rehabilitation, not some never- ending media circus.
It is the first anniversary of Terry’s clash with Ferdinand next Tuesday and, as of yesterday, we still do not know if he intends to appeal against his FA suspension and fine. The case has lasted close to seven months longer than the Battle of Stalingrad.
Many will argue that what happened on Tuesday night in Serbia undermines James’ point about pressure groups but, in some ways, it could also be interpreted as supporting it. Individuals, we can handle. We can discipline them, we can educate.
The real pressure is needed when broader society is missing the point, as happened in Serbia, where the abuse directed at Rose was not even an issue yesterday. The deluded statement of the Serbian federation would be laughable, were it not so dangerous. This is a country without racial diversity. The dialogue, the gradual evolution that is part of British life is only now beginning to take place. And paltry fines from uEFA are not going to accelerate that process. A bold move — matches behind closed doors, exclusion from the next major uEFA tournament, the 2016 European Championship — would ensure the opening of an urgent conversation. The poorest behaviour during the match in Krusevac came from the supporters, not the Serbia players, but even so there was little empathy on the pitch.
AT the Ryder Cup in Chicago last month, when the home crowd overstepped the mark in their treatment of the visiting Europeans, invariably an American player stepped in to restore decorum and good sportsmanship.
The Serbia players may not have abused Rose, but their aggressive actions following his dismissal indicated that they did not understand why he was upset. If uEFA or FIFA flexed some muscle, there would have to be change.
Indeed, until the FA receives support from the governing bodies of world and European football, it remains hard to see how there can be any improvement. The make-up of Serbian society is not yet conducive to the discourse that needs to take place.
uEFA can change this and, if they just listened, the FA, while not perfect, could show them how. From this nadir, the monkey chanters must evolve.