The anti-Semitic chants that show Russia is not the only racist nation

This is London in 2017... and we are in denial over the problems in our game

IT was early last Saturday evening when I left the Emirates after Arsenal’s victory over Spurs. I got the Tube from Holloway Road to King’s Cross St Pancras and walked to the Hammersmith & City line platform to get another train to Paddington. There was a small group of Arsenal fans ahead of me who looked like they’ d had a big afternoon. There were five or six lads and a couple of young women. I walked past them into the middle of the platform. They started singing a song. If you’re a football fan, the odds are, sadly, that you will be familiar with it.

‘We’ ll be running around Tottenham with our willies hanging out,’ they yelled in the middle of the busy platform, ‘singing I’ve got a foreskin, haven’t you? F***ing Jew.’ They managed a couple of renditions of the chant and then the train arrived and they were gone.

And this is London in 2017. And this is a part of English football in 2017. Let’s not pretend it is an isolated occurrence either.

Chelsea fans were filmed singing a version of the same chant before their FA Cup semi-final against Spurs at Wembley last April. It often happens when teams play Spurs. It is passed off as a quirk of our football culture.

I’m aware of the twisted attempts to justify songs like it, the claims that race-based abuse is somehow OK because some Spurs fans call themselves ‘Yids’.

People like the group of goons on the platform seize on that as an excuse to vent their bile but football is camouflage for their racism. Take those chants out of a stadium and transplant them into central London and it strips the vileness of them bare.

Forget football’ s cultural hinterland for a second and consider that, somehow, despite all the brutal lessons of history, anti-Semitism is on the rise again across Europe and that, in our country, many Jewish people feel alienated from one of our main political parties because of its failure to deal with the issue among its members.

That was what shocked me about these chants: not the chant itself because, however sickening it is, I’ve heard it before. It was more the sense that it was almost routine. A little group of thugs on a train platform singing a song that has the punchline ‘ F***ing Jew’ and then hopping into the carriage and riding away unmolested and triumphant.

It is strange how quick we are to recognise these sinister manifestations of racial hatred

in other nations and how slow we are to acknowledge that they exist in our own society. If we had witnessed that behaviour on the Moscow underground, we would have said i t was evidence of Russia’s toxic football culture.

When the draw is made in the Kremlin on Friday for next year’s World Cup, it will probably spawn a new series of discussions about racism in Russian football and society and whether the country should have been awarded the tournament in the first place.

And it will be a legitimate debate because Russian football has been disfigured by racism time after time after time in recent years. In 2013 Manchester City complained after Yaya Toure was subjected to monkey chants from the crowd during a Champions League game against CSKA Moscow.

The Brazilian forward, Hulk, said racist chants were aimed at him nearly every time he played for Zenit Saint Petersburg. And in September, Li verpool winger Bobby Adekanye was racially abused by home fans during an Under 19 fixture against Spartak Moscow in the Russian capital. So, sure, we can ask questions about whether Russia is fit to host the tournament on the back of evidence like that, but then maybe we should also be asking if we are fit to host the latter stages of Euro 2020 too. Why should there be one set of standards for Russia and another for us?

The problem is that we treat one form of racism — the one that happens abroad — with disgust and we all but ignore the other when it happens on our own doorstep.

We scream for sanctions when it happens in Russia or Spain or Italy but look the other way when fans of our clubs sing anti-Semitic songs. We tolerate it. We excuse it as part of our football culture. We box it up and pack it away and pretend it is not relevant to wider society.

There are suggestions that some progress has been made in tackling racism issues in the Russian game. The number of incidents involving racist abuse fell last season compared with the season before.

They have moved on since Alexei Smertin, the ex-Chelsea midfielder and now Russia’s anti-racism and discrimination inspector, said there were no racism problems in Russian football because racism did not exist in Russia.

That was a comedy denial that was treated with the contempt that it de served. But Smertin also pointed out recently that racism is not just a problem in Russian football. In his country, he said, it was largely propagated by small groups of thugs, just like the little mob I ran into on that platform.

So before we wring our hands any more about the prospect of the World Cup being defiled by being held in Russia, perhaps we should take a closer look at our own talent for denial too. The truth is, we are pretty good at it.