Football’s day of shame? No, just another own goal

TO PARA PHRASE Thomas Babington Macaulay, the 19th-century Whig politician and historian, there is no spectacle more ridiculous than English football in one of its periodic fits of morality.

Macaulay’s remarks, about the British public, were aimed at the hysterical hounding of the poet Lord Byron over his famously louche private life.

But they apply equally, if not more so, to modern society’s tendency to erupt in faux indignation, given the slightest excuse.

Goodness only knows what Macaulay would have made of today’s online lynch mobs and the demented outrage which greets every departure from the realms of acceptable behaviour.

When it comes to bogus moralising, nothing beats the nauseating posturing and sentimentality of professional football. There is no more amoral, self- serving or rapacious beast in sport. Or anywhere else, outside of the Westminster bubble, for that matter.

As I have written before, I hate everything about football, except the football.

Look at the reaction to that moronic Birmingham City fan who ran on to the pitch and thumped Aston Villa captain Jack Grealish at the weekend. It was a disgraceful incident, which could have resulted in Grealish suffering a serious injury.

Fortunately, it didn’t. The culprit was quickly apprehended and carted off to jail. He should have been taken outside, clubbed like a baby seal, and the following morning hauled before the magistrates and given an exemplary prison sentence. That’s pretty much what happened, except for the bit about him being clubbed like a baby seal. Still, you can’t have everything. Actually, he got 14 weeks — so he’ll be out in seven. And he was ordered to pay Grealish £ 100 compensation. That should make all the difference to a player reportedly on sixty grand a week.

Hardly ‘exemplary’ punishment.

BUT

that should be the end of the matter. This was an isolated incident, perpetrated by a nutter trying to make a name for himself.

Ok, so it didn’t help that he was applauded off the pitch by some of his fellow, brain- dead City supporters. But you can’t legislate for incontinent losers living in their own Twitter feed.

Nor did it help that later the same afternoon, an Arsenal fan ran on to the pitch and confronted a Manchester United player. Or that it followed a similar fracas at Hibernian recently.

But the self-righteous demands for widespread retribution and the ludicrous hand- wringing about a ‘new low for the beautiful game’ were wildly out of any kind of proportion.

Some people linked the Birmingham incident to the knife crime epidemic. What if he had been carrying a knife?

He wasn’t. you might just as well say: what if he had been wearing a suicide vest?

Apparently, players now ‘fear for their lives’. Oh, for heaven’s sake. The predictable ‘ something must be done’ brigade were out in force. Sky pundit Gary Neville demanded that Birmingham City should be forced to play their next ten games behind closed doors. Others want the club to be deducted points.

All over the unforseeable actions of a single idiot?

We’re told the club should have done more to prevent it happening. Such as?

I haven’t been to St Andrew’s, Birmingham’s home ground, for 40- odd years, since I lived in Brum and worked on the local evening paper. What I do know is that St Andrew’s, like most other big city football stadiums, has been transformed from the bad old days of rickety terracing and wall-towall hooliganism into a relatively safe, all-seater arena.

One of the frustrations of attending matches these days is that even grey-haired 60- somethings like me get searched at the turnstiles in the interests of security. you just have to grin and bear it.

Some grounds even have metal detectors. The chances of anybody smuggling in a Samuari sword, or any kind of blade, are pretty slim.

They even take the tops off plastic soft drink bottles to stop you using them as weapons — even though anyone who would want to pay a fiver for a warm Fanta, and then hit someone over the head with it before drinking it, must have more money than sense.

What are clubs supposed to do to prevent fans climbing on to the pitch — erect fences? We’ve tried that and it ended in the Hillsborough disaster.

Unsavoury as this incident was, it wasn’t Hillsborough, or Ibrox, or the Bradford fire.

It wasn’t even Millwall and Luton fans battling it out on the halfway line at kenilworth Road in the Eighties, or any of the full- scale pitch invasions which were a frequent feature of football matches in the bad old days.

None of this is to excuse what happened, or should be in any way interpreted as complacency.

But there’s no justification for the over-the-top moralising and virtue- signalling which began almost before the Birmingham idiot had been thrown in the back of a police van.

The PR machines were quickly whirring into action, churning out self-justifying statements about ‘safety is paramount’ and ‘more must be done to prevent encroachment’ and promising to ‘work with all relevant authorities’ to prevent it happening again. Everybody’s got to be in the movie.

Social media went into ‘ meltdown’. Of course it did. That’s what social media does.

It is a conduit for anonymous cry- bullies who want to vent their own sexual inadequacies on others.

I shouldn’t be surprised if at the next round of games, fans aren’t forced to observe a minute’s silence for Jack Grealish — even though he’s not technically dead. Or even seriously hurt, for that matter. Perhaps we could have a minute’s applause for the ‘ day football died of shame’.

We’ve been here before. Remember the ‘ Pray 4 Muamba’ circus, for the footballer who collapsed at White Hart Lane?

He went on to make a full recovery, happily, but that inconvenient fact was not allowed to get in the way of the predictable carnival of vicarious grief. Bring on the Portashrines! What this weekend’s incident illustrates yet again is the way in which football has barged its way to the forefront of modern life.

It’s like the old-school East End gangster who makes a great show of being kind to his mum, and handing out sweeties to local children, to pretend he’s not really a psychopath.

The professional game tries to disguise its rampant amorality behind an avalanche of rainbow laces, yellow ribbons and ‘respect’ campaigns, while at the same time cashing in on base tribalism.

YET

when this tribalism occasionally boils over, the football authorities — and their acolytes and sycophants in the media — react like maiden aunts traumatised by a glimpse of uncovered chair leg.

And while they are having a fit of the vapours over one moron from the stands attacking the Villa captain, around the country, week in, week out, players paid millions of pounds a year are setting an appalling example to the fans.

Leave aside the former England winger soon to be released from jail after serving a sentence for sexually assaulting a 15-yearold girl.

you don’t have to look far to see professional footballers — so called ‘role models’ — regularly trying to break their opponents’ legs, thrusting their heads at each other like rutting stags, and attempting to gain unfair advantage by blatant cheating, rolling on the ground in fake agony, clutching their faces after being tapped on the shoulder.

Not to mention elbowing, shirtpulling and abusing the referee.

No wonder some idiotic supporters think they are entitled to get in on the act, too.

The only surprise in this case is that Jack Grealish didn’t dive before the fan hit him . . .

What next — a minute’s silence for a player who got punched?