Saturday, January 28, 2012
"If Liverpool fans verbally attack Patrice Evra on Saturday, does that make them racists?"
Paddy Crerand posed the question a couple of days ago but, smart man, didn’t try to supply an answer. The old midfield maestro still religiously toes the Old Trafford line on most issues but you’d like to think he’d be inclined to give the Liverpool faithful the benefit of the doubt on this one.
More to the point, you’d like to think that, given the sensitivities involved, the Merseysiders would keep their lips zipped every time the French full-back gets on the ball. But, obviously, there’s about as much chance of that happening as there is of the Kop putting You’ll Never Walk Alone in cold storage for a cup clash against their fiercest rivals.
So we’re left with the ramifications of the question posed by Crerand. When, not if, the Liverpool faithful, or some of them at least, boo Evra today, will they be attacking the perpetrator of a miscarriage of justice or, alternatively, defending a man they feel was wrongly found guilty? And even if there are supposedly finer points in all this, won’t they be lost anyway in the ugly spectacle of a black footballer being roundly abused? Because if it looks like racism and it sounds like racism, well…
Luis Suarez still protests his innocence at the charge he was found guilty and banned for, following his incendiary exchange with Evra at Anfield back in October. Liverpool FC have also gone out of their way to back their man while tenaciously talking up the club’s anti-racism credentials.
United say that Evra, if selected, will be able to handle whatever comes his way.
The bad luck of the cup draw means that, for similar reasons, tensions will also be running high at Loftus Road when John Terry and Anton Ferdinand are due to share a pitch for the first time since the Chelsea captain was accused of racially abusing the QPR man, a charge which Terry will answer in court on Wednesday.
Overnight the matter took an even more sinister twist with the revelation that Ferdinand received a bullet in the post.
Whatever else happens in the cup today, it’s hard to see how race relations will be a beneficiary over the coming hours since it seems the very most one can legitimately hope for is that whatever damage incurred to the cause will be limited. Yet, there might also be a case for saying the coincidence which brings two such high-profile cases centre-stage again so soon serves to highlight something positive about how far we’ve come as well as reminding us of how much further we have to go.
Your correspondent, sadly, is of sufficient vintage to recall the long ago days when, as a black footballer, West Ham’s Clyde Best was a novelty in the old English top-flight. That sense of the exotic quickly gave way something deeply sinister and disturbing as the emergence of more black footballers was overtaken by the rise of choreographed racism on the terraces. Enter the era of the zigger-zagger chants, the massed monkey grunts and that defining photo of John Barnescontemptuously back-heeling abanana into touch.
"Meantime," writes David Goldblatt in The Ball Is Round, his monumental social history of football, "the FA saw nothing and the television coverage and commentary teams miraculously rendered it all invisible."
But as well as the overt racism hidden in plain view, there was another more insidious kind: from the tacit consensus that while black players had flair and pace they couldn’t possibly have the right stuff to be midfield enforcers let alone skippers or managers, to the routine, almost casual examples of training ground prejudice lamely disguised as "banter".
On all fronts, the English game has made considerable strides since then, and the FA and other relevant authorities deserve much credit.
But the Luis Suarez and John Terry cases — and the incident in which young Oldham defender Tom Adeyemi was reduced to tears after being racially abused by a fan at Anfield — are reminders the problem hasn’t gone away in England. And, lest we are tempted to feel smug, Eamon Zayed, for one, could share some first-hand experience of what it’s like to be on the receiving end of racist abuse in the Irish game too.
Given the problem exists in society at large, it’s obviously foolish to imagine racism can be eradicated from football. But that doesn’t mean everything possible shouldn’t be done towards achieving that goal.
Sure, arguing for zero tolerance of racism can leave you feeling a bit like a beauty pageant contestant gushing about how she’d love to see world peace or like Fr Dougal holding up his placard reading ‘Down with this sort of thing’.
On the face of it, it’s a no-brainer. Except, as recent events have shown, there are too many no-brainers out there who still don’t get the message.
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