Cruel, fickle and cowardly, Arsenal supporters booing their captain is betraying what it means to be a fan

RICHARD FREEMAN, the former British Cycling and Team Sky doctor, is to admit to telling ‘a lot of lies’, an independent medical tribunal was told last week. If Freeman ever gets round to telling a lot of truths, walls would come tumbling down, but I’m not holding my breath.

ARSENAL fans pay a lot of money to watch their team. We know this because some of them never stop talking about it. Mostly, they seem to talk about it to try to excuse their behaviour towards their managers and their players. Arsenal Man can do what he wants, apparently, because his season ticket is so expensive. If he wants to jeer and boo Granit Xhaka, try to stop him. It is his right.

It is a sad kind of logic. So if you pay for a meal at a fancy restaurant, it entitles you to reduce the waitress to tears? So if you buy a front-row seat in the stalls, it entitles you to yell at the actors and tell them to get the hell off the stage? So if you pay for a room in a nice hotel, it entitles you to scream at the concierge and tell him he should be fired?

It is a dispiritingly dystopian idea but an awful lot of people have signed up to it. Not just Arsenal fans, either, although it ought to be pointed out that they have developed a reputation for producing at the Emirates the most toxic atmosphere in any stadium in the Premier League. They’re No 1 when it comes to picking on their own. At least they’re top of the table for something.

To put it another way, they have form. Plenty of it. You’ll remember Emmanuel Eboue, I’m sure, and what happened to him. Introduced as a substitute in a home game against Wigan Athletic in 2008, Eboue was then booed mercilessly and as a result he was substituted later in the game. ‘I must say, the reaction of the fans here disgusts me,’ said Alan Parry on a television commentary at the time. Eboue said later that he had wept at the way he was singled out.

Let’s be clear about this: to boo one of your own players is to betray what it should mean to be a fan. It is cruel, it is fickle, it is cowardly and it i s self- defeating. Some Arsenal fans don’t rate Xhaka. That’s fine. But do they think booing him is going to make him play better? Do they think persistently undermining the captain is going to have a good effect on the rest of the team?

Arsene Wenger, the greatest manager in the club’s history, was pilloried at the stadium in his final years at the club. The Emirates has become a strange place to watch football. The club have finished in the top four in 17 of this century’s 20 seasons so it has not exactly been feeding off scraps and yet the stadium is an arena trapped in its seething resentment at lost glories. It is never more than a beat away from rage.

It is because they spend so much to watch their club, it is claimed, that their fans felt wholly justified in booing Xhaka, when he was substituted by Unai Emery in the 61st minute of Arsenal’s draw with Crystal Palace last Sunday. By the time he reached the touchline, the jeering coming from all corners of the ground was deafening.

Because Xhaka then had the temerity to gesture angrily at his persecutors and mouth an impolite response, some of the supporters who abused him demanded he apologise. On Thursday, Xhaka released a statement which expressed some regret for what happened but, quite rightly, stopped short of a full apology. It set the right tone. Because Xhaka has got nothing to apologise for. It is the so-called supporters who should be apologising to him.

Fans like that give it out but they can’t take it. They are pathetic. They yell abuse but they are outraged if the person they are abusing stands up for himself. They say Xhaka should be stripped of the armband because he acted improperly. Maybe the fans who were jeering him should be stripped of their season tickets. Because they acted improperly.

So 60,000 people booed and jeered him and Xhaka’s the villain because he couldn’t hide his distress and his anger? Really? So ‘fans’ sent him messages wishing cancer on his daughter and making death threats to his wife and yet still the supporters are the ones claiming the moral high ground. We’ve got this the wrong way round.

Sixty thousand bullies turning on one man and it’s that man who should say sorry? Sixty thousand people humiliating one man to the point where one of his team-mates was moved to tears at his treatment and it’s Xhaka who should back down? I don’t think so. Arsenal Man and his pals say that Xhaka should be able to take the abuse because he’s so well paid. It is a variation on the horrible, merciless idea of privileged pain. He’s paid to be ridiculed, apparently. He’s paid to watch his wife and child be subjected to vile comments? Comes with the territory. And the wage packet. That’s what some Arsenal fans say. The reality is different.

Xhaka is so upset by his treatment that he has been offered counselling. Being turned on by a crowd of people who are supposed to be on your side can do that to you. Some of his team-mates — the same team-mates who elected him captain — felt concerned enough about him to visit him at home. Odd, isn’t it, that footballers might have feelings, too.

Some Arsenal fans don’t feel Xhaka is good enough to be in the team, let alone be captain. But it’s not Xhaka’s fault that Emery keeps picking him. Not that the Arsenal boss has exactly stood shoulder to shoulder with his captain in the last week. The way the manager has handled the fallout from the Xhaka affair feels symptomatic of a club drifting under Emery’s weak leadership.

It is almost as if, by equivocating, Emery thinks he can curry favour with the mob that rains down the jeers from the stands in the Premier League’s most toxic stadium. It will not help him. Soon, the mob will come for him, too.